BOSTON — Massachusetts’ public-records law could receive landmark reform if two bills filed in the Legislature in conjunction with Sunshine Week succeed.
The bills, filed in the House by Rep. Peter Kocot, D-Northampton, and in the Senate by Sen. Jason Lewis, D-Winchester, would grind away at the technological and administrative barriers that private citizens and media organizations face when requesting public records.
The legislation would take several steps to modernize the public records process, including:
* Promoting access to records in digital form.
* Requiring public agencies to designate a “records access officer” to process requests.
* Lowering costs for those requesting records and capping redaction charges.
* Requiring public agencies to pay requester’s attorneys’ fees when access to public records is wrongly denied.
The legislation has support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in the House.
“It just seems logical. We’re bringing the commonwealth into the next century, or the present century,” said state Rep. Colleen Garry, D-Dracut.
“I witnessed firsthand one of my colleagues, Rep. Shaunna O’Connell of Taunton, being charged several hundred dollars by the Patrick administration for documents,” state Rep. Marc Lombardo, R-Billerica, said. “That’s just not how the system is supposed to work.”
Gavi Wolfe, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said the freedom of information is essential to a functioning democracy.
“Legislative leadership has made some government reforms a priority: ethics, campaign finance, other similar issues. This is the next logical step in this progression,” Wolfe said. “This is something in this state we need to tackle — frankly, to be true to our roots.
“We think of ourselves as the cradle of liberty and the place where American democracy got its start. If we want to own that legacy, we need to make sure the public has good access to info about our government,” Wolfe said.
The ALCU is one of several organizations comprising the Massachusetts Freedom of Information Alliance, including Common Cause Mass., the League of Women Voters of Mass., Mass. Newspaper Publishers Association and the New England First Amendment Coalition.
“It would make the fees be saner,” Robert Ambrogi, executive director of Mass. Newspaper Publishers Association.
Ambrogi said the potential costs involved in a public- records request are a significant barrier to entry. This is sometimes due to agencies charging for staff time spent compiling the records and not the actual cost of reproducing them.
“Being charged fees that no ordinary person whose last name is not Gates or Trump can pony up, that’s one of the ways that we are kept in the dark about the operations of our government,” Wolfe said.
“Most citizens, never mind most media organizations, don’t have the ability to litigate every public- records request,” said Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition. “There’s really no way to force those agencies to give those documents to the requester.”
Proponents of the legislation say it wouldn’t necessarily expand the law, which Wolfe called “essentially toothless,” but make it easier to enforce.
“Enforcement of the law is left to the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s office, and they have a significant backlog of cases to deal with,” Ambrogi said.
Wolfe said the public-records law has not been meaningfully updated since 1973 and should reflect the digital revolution.
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