(The Center Square) – A Washington bill concerning public records requests advanced out of committee, but not before lawmakers amended it to remove a proposed task force and narrow the scope to just school districts.
House Bill 2661 sponsored by Rep. Skyler Rude, R-Walla Walla, would have originally created a temporary task force of eight voting members and four nonvoting legislators to “to examine the impact of frivolous, retaliatory, or harassing public records requests on state and local agencies, and strategies to deter such requests.”
However, the substitute bill proposed by Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, and advanced out of the House State Government & Tribal Relations on Feb. 4 removed the task force, instead directing the Joint Legislative Audit & Review Commission to investigate the issue and report back to the governor and state Legislature.
However, another change in the bill focuses the work on school districts only.
While the Washington Coalition for Open Government hasn’t taken a stance on HB 2661 in its current form, Secretary George Erb wrote in an email to The Center Square that “too often the state Legislature’s response to real or perceived problems with the Public Records Act is to limit access.
“We contend that Washington state’s records-request system is badly in need of repair,” he wrote. “But restricting access to records won’t solve the problem. Doing so would deny more of us access to public records, increasing secrecy and reducing accountability.”
He further wrote that “a more productive approach would focus on adopting better technology and processes for making records available more efficiently.
“That course of action would benefit agencies and the public alike,” he continued. “Frequently we see legislative proposals that presuppose the existence of a public records problem without defining it or establishing its scope.”
One of the problems with bill is its attempt to address “frivolous, retaliatory, or harassing” records request,” he wrote.
“Who gets to decide?” the statement said “WashCOG takes transparency policy seriously because we see it as foundational to our form of government. Citizens can’t oversee their government and its policies if they don’t know what’s going on.”
Washington Schools Risk Management Pool General Counsel Tyna Ek was among those to testify in favor of HB 2661, telling The Center Square in a phone interview that her organization isn’t “looking for ways to narrow the Public Records Act.”
She said that other states have changed laws around records requests limiting either the number of requests that can be made by one person within a year, or allowing entities to charge for records if it exceeds certain staff time and costs.
Regarding the costs, Ek noted that JLARC recently issued a report that found state agencies were spending $137 million and 1.2 million work hours responding to requests.
For the risk pool, Ek said one issue they’re concerned with is that if they’re in the midst of a legal dispute, the private party can file records requests to obtain information in addition to the discovery process. Something governments aren’t able to do.
“Our risk pool is a public risk pool,” Ek said. “Instead of buying insurance the school districts pool their resources and create a public organization to handle their litigation. If they just bought insurance instead of self-insurance, they couldn’t get this information from an insurance company.”
