Tuesday night, Tristan Israel, chairman of the Tisbury board of selectmen, provided an update on proposed changes to legislation intended to strengthen the Massachusetts Public Records Law.
Massachusetts is widely considered to have one of the weakest public record laws in the country, and the proposed changes would be the first effort to strengthen the law, which dates back to 1973, in more than four decades.
The bill, which has support from many advocacy groups and lawmakers, would fine agencies that violate the law, cover the costs of attorney fees for requestors who successfully sue for public record access, reduce the cost of copies, and make electronic documents more easily obtainable, among other changes. These changes would attempt to keep agencies from charging outlandish fees or not adhering to the 10-day compliance policy.
When the bill was first proposed, there was hope the House would vote on it by the end of August. On July 28, however, the House put off the vote until later in the year after facing local opposition from the Massachusetts Municipal Association (MMA), a “nonprofit, nonpartisan association that provides advocacy, training, publications, research, and other services to Massachusetts cities and towns.” The MMA objected to certain tenets of the proposed bill that have found strong support among newspapers and open-government advocates.
Mr. Israel, who sits on the MMA policy board, said they discussed the legislation at a meeting last week. He said the MMA has been working with legislators to try to modify some of the terms of the proposed bill.
“They did say there will be a bill that will be passed, because the lobbying of the press is enormous,” he said. “But we’re trying to make it so the timeframe is a little more reasonable, and so communities can at least somewhat reasonably recoup some of the costs to be able to provide this information.”
He said they were also looking to make changes to the section that states one person can request records up to 15 times a month.
“Basically, everybody knows that something is going to pass,” he said. “But they are working to try to make it a little more reasonable for the communities.”