Last week, a significant step was taken on Beacon Hill towards improving our state’s public records laws. The Boston Sunday Globe reported on how backwards and outdated public records laws in Massachusetts truly are: ranking behind every other state except Hawaii.
The Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight reported out a redrafted committee bill, H.3665 on Thursday, July 16th, that would among other things create the following reforms:
• Require state agencies and municipal departments to provide records requests electronically
• Limit the cost of photocopies to 5 cents per page by state agencies and municipal departments
• Allow attorney’s fees to requesters if a court determined that they were wrongfully denied access to public records
• Assign a designated public records officer in each agency or department, for greater accountability to the record requester
Great credit on this progress goes to committee co-chairs Senator Joan Lovely (D-Salem) and Representative Peter Kocot (D-Northampton), as well as Senator Jason Lewis (D-Winchester), whose bill S.1676 mirrors the redrafted committee bill.
Since the beginning of the legislative session, newspapers from across Massachusetts, and good government groups, including Common Cause, MassPIRG, and the ACLU have been advocating for public records reforms, highlighted at the joint committee’s public hearing on public records reform bills in May. In addition, Secretary of State Bill Galvin has suggested that he may propose a ballot referendum to push reforms, if the Legislature does not pass comprehensive legislation this session.
Efforts at updating the state’s public records laws are not new. Many legislators, including myself, have been filing bills for over five years, and last session the Joint Committee on State Administration reported out a similar bill to the one reported out last week. The bottom line is our public records laws have not been significantly updated since 1973 and the time for change is now.
Unfortunately, last Friday legislators from across the state began receiving calls and emails from some of their municipal officials, asking us to vote against the bill, water down the reform, or delay its passage. The time for this bipartisan reform has come, and is in fact long overdue.
If you care about updating our state’s public records laws, making government and government decisions more transparent, and improving the public and the media’s ability to access public information, please contact your State Representative and State Senator this week, and urge the House and Senate to take up and pass H.3665 by the July 31st legislative recess.
You can reach your State Representative @ 617-722-1600 AND your State Senator @ 617-722-1455.
If you can’t get through to them personally leave your message of support for H.3665 with their aide. Having been an aide to both former Representative Mike Festa and Katherine Clark I can affirm that these calls are important and all smart politicians pay attention to what their constituents think on these issues. Speak up now and let your voice be heard.
Thank you Senator Jamie Eldridge for your leadership on this issue and thank you to my Senator Jason Lewis, sponsor of S.1676 —both proud and strong progressives.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Founder, P.O.W.A.R. (Progressives Organizing Wakefield to Advance Reform )
Is it too late to get the photocopying costs at courthouses capped at 5 cents a copy too? Someone’s making a lot of money at 25 cents a copy.
under the purview of the Public Records law?
the sad truth is that much of the public’s business is done behind closed doors.
If I am correct, the Open Meeting statutes do not apply to private executive sessions.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
…though I believe most committee meetings and plenary sessions are public anyway. Bodies to which the OML does apply have very limited allowances for going into executive session.
..unless you are a reporter, in which case the court officers will escort you out.
are private organizations that cannot be covered by the OML or the public records law. I know the Dem caucus rules say their caucuses are open to the public except when they vote otherwise, although the Dems routinely assume that their caucuses are closed, and I have seen reporters escorted out of them. I have never seen nor heard of a reporter being removed from a legislative committee hearing in over 40 years. Can you give us an example or two of when that has happened, Porcu?
I am uncertain about the rules of the GOP caucus and their experience with reporters.
We need to get a grasp of the reality of trying to run a small municipality in this state. One local resident with a cause can tie up a limited staff with records requests.
I appreciate the need for transparency, but we need some sort of a recognition of the reality on the local level. It is all too easy for a volunteer board to get entangled in open meeting issues, even though they are doing their best to be open and transparent in their work. Meanwhile, the state legislature has exempted itself from all these open meeting and public records requirements that we need to strictly adhere to on the local level.
It’s okay for my friend Senator Eldridge to push for greater transparency at the local level, and I agree there are some municipal offices that go out of their way to make it difficult for people to make reasonable requests for public records. However, I think the legislature should get its own act in order first, and remove its own exemptions before passing more stringent requirements on municipalities.
Ideally it should not be possible for that to happen because the public records are already online and easily accessible. That really isn’t that hard.
I’m with Pablo on this one. I wish I could be entirely enthusiastic about reform, because transparency and public access to information are central to the whole project of democratic self-government.
But I’m tremendously worried about the costs of compliance. I’m an appointed officeholder in a gateway city, and our professional staff is already going above and beyond the call of duty in every area within their responsibility — including responding to record requests. Which can’t always be done electronically, because this is a poor city that has a lot of paper records that haven’t been digitalized. We’re understaffed, we underpay our staff because we don’t have the resources to do otherwise. My people are already working more hours than they’ll ever be compensated for, out of sheer determination to keep the wheels turning.
We respond to record requests, but we don’t always give them priority over all else, because there are limits to what people can do in a day. If somebody shows up wanting papers that require a staff member to spend days in the archives, what happens to that person’s other work, which may genuinely be time-sensitive? Where are we supposed to find the revenue stream to pay for this, or compensate someone who already has way too many responsibilities for taking on the new public-records-officer role?
I hope there are answers to all of this, and that I’m being unnecessarily alarmist. As I said, I agree entirely with the goal. But I am concerned that you all are assuming that every municipality in the Commonwealth can comply with this new regime without any great burden or disruption, and I’m not at all sure that’s actually true.
A single PDF can be printed multiple times. Said scanning can be automatic going forward, eliminating subsequent need for photocopying.
I gave a problem believing your city is creating new records with a typewriter and carbon paper.
When you’re talking about the kinds of documents for which you need flat files, that may have been put away somewhere in a basement thirty years ago.
I’m not worried about public access to newly-created records that either already exist in electronic form or that are at least simple to find and copy. I am concerned that the new rules may not fully take into account that not all documents to which public access is sought will necessarily fall into that category. We’ve had to respond to records requests that don’t: I’m not just pulling an implausible worst-case scenario out of my hat here.
Make the new requirement apply to all records created after 2000, or some other date. Dollars a page are being charged for PUBLIC records that were created and maintained on line, and that is what needs to stop.
The Mass Municipal Association met with Rep Peter Kocot on this subject yesterday, according to the State House News Service:
“Rep. Peter Kocot, a Northampton Democrat who co-chairs the Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight, said on Tuesday he had a “very productive” meeting with the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which worried his bill would impose a burden on local governments.
“They bounced some ideas off of us,” said Kocot, who said he anticipates more concrete recommendations from the lobbying group that represents municipal officials later in the week.”
The full article is longer and goes into a bit of detail on the general proposal and the muni impact in particular.