The Arizona Legislature is considering a pair of bills that would limit public access to government records and make it more difficult for individuals to recoup legal costs in battles with the government over those records.
Supporters said the intent is to protect crime victims and witnesses and to prevent individuals from using records requests to harass local governments.
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Read More… from Arizona bills would limit access to public records
Every Floridian who cares about transparency in public affairs and about keeping government accountable to the taxpayers should be worried about the latest effort in Tallahassee to stifle the state’s public records law.
It’s a head-on frontal attack on the law, although it’s disguised as a mere word change in the existing Sunshine statute. The relevant wording states that a judge “shall” award attorneys fees when citizens win a lawsuit over a public records request that was wrongly denied.
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Read More… from Editorial: Don’t mess with our Sunshine laws
In 2015, the legislature passed a bill that restored much of the public access to police arrest records that had been lost in a devastating state Supreme Court decision.
That legislative action — and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's signature — amounted to a welcome (and these days rare) victory for the cause of open government.
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Read More… from Editorial: Agenda for Connecticut government: Restore transparency, accountability
The Poynter Institute’s columnist Kelly Hinchcliffe complies a collection of most intriguing public records stories from all 50 states from 2015.
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Public records requests have surged in recent years, thanks in large part to the transparency and open data movements.
The U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which has been evaluating transparency in state spending for six years, reported that 2015 saw dramatic improvements in how and how much information was provided online. The same goes for cities, where the number of open data sets accessible to the public has climbed since the Open Knowledge Foundation began tracking them in 2013.
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Read More… from Making government transparency more transparent
The more than 27-year-old case file on the disappearance of Randy Leach, a Linwood high school honor student, must be thousands of pages.
But it's impossible to know because the Leavenworth County Sheriff's Office and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, who investigated the long-ago mystery, refuse to release the records even to Leach's parents, Harold and Alberta Leach.
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Read More… from Push is on to make police investigation records public in Kansas
Thirteen days ago, lawmakers in the state House passed a bill to shield a police officer’s name when a firearm is discharged or he uses force while on duty — without defining what the “use of force” might include — unless the officer is charged with a crime.
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In the dim light of a smartphone, the lettering on the side of the 10-odd white storage boxes is faintly legible: "Confidential Medical Information. Medical Personnel Only." A few feet away, in this darkened corner of a storage warehouse on East Main Street, another box is labeled "Unpaid Parking Tickets." There are long cabinets with flat drawers — the label on one reads "TVA Project." Two mattresses sprawl incongruously nearby.
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Read More… from Chattanooga plans effort to get rid of decades of stored records
Under a new bill, Massachusetts would join 47 other states that allow people to recoup legal fees after successfully suing for access to public records.
The legislature’s first move in more than 40 years to update the Massachusetts public records law is getting mixed reviews from some government transparency advocates.
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Read More… from Massachusetts public records bill gets mixed reviews
Oregon government agencies may be jeopardizing public trust with slow responses to more complex public records requests and inconsistent use of exemptions, according to a state audit report released Tuesday.
The audit is part of the fallout from an influence peddling scandal involving Gov. John Kitzhaber and First Lady Cylvia Hayes. Auditors recommended that the state create an ombudsman position to “serve as an intermediary between the public and state agencies on complex records requests.”
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Read More… from Auditor: Public trust at stake as Oregon agencies bungle records requests
