The start of summer

As summer begins, our very small staff at the Lucy Burns Institute is suffering a deep bereavement of a beloved family member and also preparing for a joyful event later this summer.

Thank you for your patience with my very reduced blogging schedule–which I know is irrelevant in the broader scheme of things.

The Washington state legislature…open? Not so much

The Washington State Legislature is one of several state legislatures that exempts its own materials from disclosure.

The Seattle Times reports in Will Legislature open its own records? on a hearing last week about changing this exemption.

Tennessee changes non-resident request policy

Eight states currently have a law restricting records requests to residents.

However, last week, the government of Tennessee backed off of enforcing its policy under pressure from the ACLU.

Wisconsin court will decide key records case

Are the personal e-mails sent from work by Wisconsin public school teachers subject to the Wisconsin Open Records Law?

The Wisconsin Supreme Court, which has a mixed record when it comes to public access to government documents, will be deciding the case later this year.

This is an especially interesting case because the lawsuit suggests that even it is concluded that public employees have a right to send and receive the occasional e-mail from work without exposing their private life to public scrutiny, there is only one way to find out if public employees are spending what the lawsuit refers to as an excessive amount of time sending and receiving private e-mails while at work.

In other words, even emails that would ordinarily be judged private can become relevant to the public when they are looked at in order to assess how many such private e-mails public employees are sending while at work.

Oh nooooo!!!!! A rash of sunshine troublemaking in Louisiana

Disaster has struck in Louisiana, where officials in Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes say they have been inundated with public records requests.

There’s a high profile legal case in New Orleans about whether e-mails from the New Orleans City Council should be made public. Numerous stories in the local press about that has apparently clued engaged citizens in on something they may not have fully realized before, which is that under the Louisiana Public Records Act, they can file requests for the e-mails of local administrators and elected officials.

However, all is not lost.

Just because regular people figure out they’re entitled to review the e-mail traffic of their local elected officials doesn’t mean the local elected officials have to hand over their e-mails. In response to this outbreak of engaged citizenry:

In response, some municipalities are revising their public records policies, raising the cost to provide records or ignoring the law completely.

St. Tammany Parish is upset because a local television station “came to us on a fishing expedition and requested every e-mail to and from the parish president for a year.”

According to a local official, “It took us over 100 hours just to figure out how many there were to tell them how much it would cost.”

Why? Why did it take them 100 hours to figure out how many emails the parish president had sent in a year? That’s absurd and it’s not the fault of the local television station.

Local governments: It’s your job to have a system in place that allows you to quickly and inexpensively retrieve electronically produced public records.

It is not your job to complain that you’re being burdened with excessive records requests. When the local TV station asked for the records, no doubt they believed that it would take you all of ten minutes to get those records. Why? Because they know that it would take them all of ten minutes to figure out how many emails they had sent and received in the previous year, so it would never have occurred to them that you are using some uber-baroque email retention system where it takes 100 HOURS to figure out this elementary information.

Texas transparency in trouble

There are over 100 bills in this session of the Texas State Legislature that would restrict the public’s access to information about what government officials are up to.

When I’m travelling

It’s a good thing that others are blogging, like Transparent Nevada.

Someone should ask for records about this

A Lawrence (Massachusetts) school principal has been placed on leave while the administration investigates teachers union allegations that she promoted her racy romance novel during faculty meetings.

Which is worse?

A government subsidy for a torture porn producer, or publicizing the record confirming it was given?

Proposed reforms in state sunshine laws

At WikiFOIA, we’re trying hard to stay on top of this year’s crop of state legislative changes to state sunshine laws.

Here’s the list of proposed changes for Alabama-Kentucky. Then there’s the list for Louisiana-North Dakota and the list for Ohio to Wyoming.

I’m sure the lists aren’t altogether complete–although the lists as they are include many, many proposed changes. If you know of a proposed change in your state that’s not yet mentioned, please do add it.