Committee working on public records bill

A six-member legislative conference committee has been tasked with working out major differences between the House and Senate in competing bills to overhaul the state’s outdated and much-criticized public records law.
 
The House approved a bill last November before the holiday break and the Senate approved its own version in February. Both bills received unanimous roll call votes.
 
The two branches have until the end of July to reach agreement on a final bill to send to the governor before the legislative session ends.
 
With a conference committee now at work and the parameters for a final bill set, the MMA is supporting the House version, which would establish strict but workable timelines for complying with public record requests, a limited but manageable fee schedule to cover the cost of compliance, and a tough but balanced system for enforcing the new rules. The House bill would significantly tighten up the records law and require cities and towns to review and improve local practices.
 
The Senate bill would go far beyond the House version and create what the MMA argues is an unnecessarily bureaucratic public records system that would impose significant new costs on cities and towns. The costs would come mainly through the loss of revenue now collected to reimburse communities for the work of complying with complex and high-volume requests from businesses, organizations and other parties and from a one-sided enforcement system that would expose local government to significant legal costs.
 
The House and Senate bills have the same general features, but are different in important details and in the fiscal and operational impact on cities, towns and state agencies. The House and Senate would both create timelines for response to and compliance with public record requests, place limits on fees that could be charged for the work of finding and providing records while protecting privacy, and establish a system for ensuring compliance with the new law.
 
Both bills would require every city and town to appoint at least one records access officer to coordinate and facilitate compliance with public record requests and to collect information about requests to be filed with the secretary of state’s office and the Legislature. The Senate bill would require a much more extensive and time-consuming reporting requirement than the House bill.
 
Both bills would make the first two hours of work to comply with a request free of charge. After two hours, the House bill would generally allow a reasonable fee to be charged that reflects actual costs, while the Senate would strictly limit what work could be covered by a fee and how much could be charged without special permission from the secretary of state’s office.
 
One of the main concerns raised by the MMA is the enforcement provision in the Senate bill, which would expose municipalities and local taxpayers to threats of expensive litigation through an unbalanced process that would significantly limit or remove judicial discretion on the issue of awarding attorneys’ fees and court costs – even when local officials act in good faith – and create a litigious and penalty-driven process. These provisions, the MMA argues, would give plaintiff attorneys new financial incentives to pursue costly litigation on public records cases and would create a disincentive for plaintiff attorneys to resolve disagreements outside the courtroom.
 
Conference committee members are Representatives Peter Kocot of Northampton, Stephen Kulik of Worthington, and Mathew Muratore of Plymouth, and Senators Joan Lovely of Salem, Jason Lewis of Winchester and Donald Humason of Westfield.