This bill was voted out of the House Administration Committee on Wednesday with 3 On the Merits votes. The NJ expands on the discussions, with Speaker Gilligan making it clear he doesn’t want to entertain Amendments that will weaken the bill:
The lead sponsor of the proposal, House Speaker Robert F. Gilligan, D-Sherwood Park, said he would entertain amendments on the House floor — provided they were not intended to weaken the bill. He also vowed that, if need be, he would use a heavy hand to make sure the bill is debated fully and brought to a vote.
Legislators are looking for FOIA exemptions for constituent email and there are likely more exemptions to come. In addition, the Comptroller weighs in:
Controller General Russ Larson came to the committee meeting to suggest that the Legislature would need a full-time employee to handle record retrieval and research tasks that would come with the new openness provisions. He set the personnel cost at $61,500 a year. Larson said the state Department of Technology and Information had reported that its staff was overextended because of open-records requests. He suggested that the General Assembly might want to consider spending $500,000 for a message-journaling system to help with the historic research required for many such requests. “You can certainly pass this bill without putting a penny in the budget,” Larson said. “It just means that a person doing one thing now will be doing this, too.”
Compliance with FOIA requests can be labor intensive, and approving this without adding either the labor or infrastructure to handle the requests can functionally render this whole project useless. We aren’t going to get much Open Government if it takes months after a decision has been taken to get information on it.
But you can get around this by just defacto getting certain types of records and information up on the web pretty immediately and let the public just go get the info without additional mediation. Some info is certainly always going to be exempt from this, AND getting information organized and up on the web in a retrievable fashion needs labor resources too.
It looks as though this is going to get a pretty lively debate in the House and that there are those lining up to add places where information can be shielded from the public. Some of this will be merited, but watching for unnecessary hiding places is going to be a big part of the watching effort going forward.