It’s been 26 years. What’s a few more days?

Bluegrass Politics spotlights a great case from Kentucky.

In 1983, road contractor Leonard Lawson pled guilty to violating anti-trust laws. He gave a statement to the investigators with the Kentucky Attorney General’s office.

Fast forward 26 years. Lawson is on trial again, this time on charges that he and some associates conspired to pay for internal Transportation Cabinet estimates on road projects that his companies wanted to submit bids on in 2006-2007.

With a trial coming up, newspapers in Kentucky want to see what Lawson had to say for himself 26 years ago, so they filed a Kentucky Open Records Act request.

That request was denied, so they went to court.

On July 29, a Franklin Circuit Court judge Thomas Wingate issued a temporary restraining order barring the release of the old documents. He said a slight delay would not harm the public’s right to know.

The newspapers disagree. Their attorney said in a brief to the court, “The fact that the OAG did not disclose the records in the past 26 years is nothing more than a consequence of the fact that no one asked for them.”

Illinois response time shortened to five days

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn just signed a good revision of the Illinois Sunshine Law.

One of the best changes is that the mandatory response time was reduced from seven days to five days.

Here’s a chart that compares request response times by state.

30% of states still don’t have any mandatory time limit for responding to FOIA requests. I believe it was Chicagoan Rahm Emanuel who said that you should never let a good crisis go to waste. In this case, sunshine-minded politicians in Illinois used the Blagojevich mess to push through these good reforms.

See the Chicago Tribune’s story:

Gov. Pat Quinn signs overhaul of state’s open records law.

On the off-chance you haven’t seen this

Biden Invokes Freedom Of Information Act To Find Out When Woman Gets Off Work.

We’re looking for a writer for WikiFOIA

Details here. Please spread the word!

Local governments in Illinois resist FOIA changes

Opposition Grows to Illinois FOIA Changes.

The Illinois legislature improved the Illinois state sunshine law earlier this year. Among other things, they added a provision for a public access counselor to mediate disputes when records are denied.

Now, the Illinois Municipal League is lobbying Gov. Pat Quinn not to sign the bill.

As far as I know, no group does an annual scorecard of which groups do the most lobbying against better public information laws. But anecdotally, the city and county-based taxpayer-funded lobbying outfits seem to have pride of place.

Petition signatures and open records

One big open records story this year is whether signatures on petitions should be public or private. In the State of Washington, the group Who Signed? plans to publish on its website the names of those who signed Referendum 71.

R-71 is an attempt to overturn, through the veto referendum process, the “all-but-marriage” law passed earlier this year. A federal judge has granted a temporary restraining order to the people running the R-71 campaign, with a full hearing in September on the question of signature privacy.

I’m on Tim Eyman’s email list — same state, different issue — from which I understand that an activist with the National Education Association has requested information about who signed I-1033, a tax-limitation proposal.

Eyman is concerned that the National Education Association will cross-index the list of those who signed his petition against their lists of public school teachers in the state. He writes:

Will the very powerful Charles Hasse and the WEA/NEA/AFT use I-1033′s petition signers to identify those teachers and other public employees who need to be coerced into opposing I-1033? Do the teachers and other public employees who signed I-1033′s petitions need help gettin’ their minds right?

And that’s only about 10% as hot as the rhetoric around the domestic partnership petition’s signatures.