Editorial: For truly public records – Albany Democrat Herald
Senate Bill 41, requested by Attorney General John Kroger, was intended to make Oregon’s public records law work better for the public.
But it has been stalled in the Senate and been amended multiple times at the request of associations of local government, which are not at all keen to labor under stricter deadlines and tighter limits on the fees they can charge for producing records somebody wants to see.
The bill was referred to the Senate General Government committee on Jan. 18. The committee held a public hearing on March 14, followed by another two days later.
The committee held a work session to discuss and amend the bill on April 13. It did so again on the 18th, and again on the 20th, and one more time on the 29th.
At the last meeting, it sent the bill back to the Senate president for referral to another committee. And then it went to the Rules Committee.
Why, you wonder, all that anxiety over making public records more available more quickly to the public?
Partly it’s because some requests for public records are a pain in the neck even for the most well-meaning agency in state or local government. If somebody requests all the e-mails and other correspondence over the last five years regarding land-use regulation, there has to be a way to discourage that kind of fishing expedition.
One way to avoid this is to amend the public records law to discourage those kinds of blanket requests. The law might say, for example, that unless a record being requested is less than a year old, it has to be described in detail by its nature and its date in order for a public body to have to go find and produce it.
That example of potential limits may be too restrictive. But some limit surely is appropriate to discourage a demand such as: “We’d like to see copies of everything the city has ever written or received concerning the paving of streets going back to 1957.”
There is, however, a much
better alternative, one that wouldn’t cost the government or the taxpayers anything. It is to make all public records routinely available online.
That means everything that amounts to a public record. The Internet supposedly has the capacity to hold an infinite amount of material, so this suggestion at least has the potential of being feasible.
No more paper records period. Everything is written and restored digitally, and everything is instantly available unless it meets a very narrow definition of being exempt.
So if somebody walks in and and wants to see something from three years ago, the clerk in the agency need only say: “It’s already out there. Happy hunting.”
If public employees responding to such requests are in the friendlier mood, they might give the requester a few clues on how to retrieve the item he wants.
We should shoot for a world where public information is truly public, meaning that anybody can retrieve anything he needs without having to fill out an application, pay a fee or instigate an expensive and labor-intensive search.
That’s what a true public records reform bill should seek to achieve. (hh)