BOSTON — The lawmaker who drafted a bill to adjust the state’s public-records law said he is optimistic it will be taken up by the full House next week as he awaits proposals from a municipal lobbying group that objected to aspects of the legislation.
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.
While the Legislature is exempt from the public-records law and Kocot’s bill would not change that, the House and Senate chairpersons of the committee provided draft changes to the bill, explanatory documents and all of the testimony received by the committee in response to a request for drafts and all correspondence.
The bill (H 3665), which is pending in the House Committee on Ways and Means, would generally increase the fines for failure to provide public records and allow plaintiffs to recover attorney’s fees in public-records cases.
The bill would also extend from 10 days to 15 days the deadline for compliance, at which point public entities would need to completely fulfill every records request, according to the municipal association, and every city and town would need to designate at least one records officer. The association also objected to the lower allowable fees per copy and limits on allowable reimbursement for staff time spent producing records.
A few changes to lessen the proposed increased penalties for non-compliance were made from the earlier version The Massachusetts Municipal Association is the only group on record opposing the bill, according to the documents Kocot provided.
In a May 26 letter to Kocot’s committee, the association opposed public-records law updates pending in Kocot’s committee, arguing they would “impose burdensome requirements on cities, towns and local taxpayers that cannot reasonably be met except for the most simple requests for records.” The group also opposes the redrafted version that cleared the committee.
The new version of the bill also includes some relief for towns “inundated by repetitive requests” that Kocot said may be designed to harass. Declining to name the towns because he said there are lawsuits underway, Kocot said the bill provides a process where extra time or other allowances could be granted in exceptional circumstances.
Among the correspondence Kocot provided was a request from the Selectboard of Ashfield asking for a process towns can used in those situations.
“As you know, the Town of Ashfield has labored for five years under a barrage of regular, numerous, voluminous, repeated, and convoluted public document requests,” the Selectboard wrote. Calling the requests a “genuine hardship,” the Selectboard said the law can be used “as a weapon against the public interest by protracted, unrelenting and abusive requests that can cripple a town’s ability to meet its numerous responsibilities.”
The public-records law requires entities provide any member of the public with records that are not exempt from the law, allowing the public entity to charge a fee associated with producing the records and including a penalty of $20 for public agencies that don’t comply. Working documents provided by Kocot describe the current penalty as “meaningless” and said it is likely never levied.
The bill would raise that penalty, bringing it to $20 per-day for the first 30 days and then $50 per-day thereafter. An earlier version of the bill would have fined entities $100 per-day for non-compliance. The new version of the bill also allows courts to waive the fine in cases where a public officer made a “good faith attempt to comply.”
Kocot said he drafted the bill himself in consultation with the committee’s Senate chair, Joan Lovely, a Salem Democrat. In a letter to the News Service signed by both Kocot and Lovely, they wrote that it is the committee’s policy to provide the public with copies of testimony, bills and the votes of members at no charge.
Along with testimony encouraging a more robust law from members of the news media and non-profits, the committee was lobbied to pass a public-records law by their colleagues in the Legislature, including Sen. Ken Donnelly, an Arlington Democrat, who was co-chair of the committee last session.
Writing in support of the bill were Reps. Sarah Peake, Louis Kafka, Jennifer Benson, Smitty Pignatelli, Sean Garballey, Steven Ultrino, and Josh Cutler, a former newspaper editor and publisher who said he could “personally attest to the importance of robust public access to government records here in Massachusetts.”
“Excessive fees, lengthy delays and bureaucratic hurdles too often rend our public records public in name only,” Cutler wrote.
