Who is a member?
Our members are the local governments of Massachusetts and their elected and appointed leadership.
The legislative conference committee charged with drafting a compromise bill to update the state’s public records law has been hearing from select panels of experts, including the MMA and the Massachusetts Municipal Lawyers Association, since first meeting in early March.
Committee members hope to reach agreement on a bill before formal legislative sessions end on July 31.
So far, the committee has heard from representatives of the attorney general’s office and the secretary of state’s office, both of which have key roles in administering and enforcing the law, as well as from the state comptroller, who helps coordinate public record responses for the Executive Branch.
On March 30, the committee heard from Common Cause Massachusetts, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association. These groups argued for stricter control over fees charged for public records and the time allowed to comply with a records request. They also pushed for some measure of mandatory penalties on cities and towns.
On April 13, MMA Executive Director Geoffrey Beckwith led an MMA panel that was followed by attorneys Matthew Feher and Kevin Batt representing the MMLA and a representative from the municipal clerks’ association.
Beckwith asked the committee to draft a balanced bill that recognized the real cost to cities and towns of compliance with increasingly complex and voluminous records requests, particularly when privacy issues are involved for citizens and municipal employees. He noted that unreasonable caps on fees would amount to an unfunded mandate.
Beckwith also opposed provisions that would require courts to award – with no discretion – attorney fees and other court costs to people seeking records in some cases. He noted that every dispute over a record has a different set of facts, and that courts should retain the authority to determine if any of the parties were acting in a way that warranted a penalty.
The House approved a bill last November, and the Senate approved its own version in February. Both the House and Senate bills have the same general features, but are different in important details and in the fiscal and operational impact on cities and towns.
The MMA has supported the House version, which would establish strict but workable timelines for complying with public record requests, a limited but manageable fee schedule to cover the cost of compliance, and a tough but balanced system for enforcing the new rules. The House bill would significantly tighten the records law and require cities and towns to review and improve local practices.
The MMA has opposed many provisions in the Senate bill that would go far beyond the House-approved bill and create an “unnecessarily bureaucratic public records system” that would impose significant new costs on cities and towns mainly through the loss of revenue now collected to pay for the work of complying with complex and high-volume requests from private businesses, organizations and other parties, and from a one-sided enforcement system that exposes local government to significant legal costs.
The House and Senate would both create timelines for response to and compliance with public record requests, place limits on fees that could be charged for the work of finding and providing records while protecting privacy, and establish a system for ensuring compliance with the new law.
Both bills would require every city and town to appoint at least one Records Access Officer to coordinate and facilitate compliance with public record requests and to collect information about requests to be filed with the secretary of state and the Legislature. The Senate bill would require a much more extensive and time-consuming reporting requirement than the House bill.
Both bills would make the first two hours of work to comply with a records request free of charge. After two hours, the House bill would generally allow a reasonable fee to be charged that reflects actual costs, while the Senate would strictly limit what work could be covered by a fee and how much could be charged without special permission from the secretary of state’s office.
The conference committee members are Reps. Peter Kocot of Northampton, Stephen Kulik of Worthington and Mathew Muratore of Plymouth, and Sens. Joan Lovely of Salem, Jason Lewis of Winchester and Donald Humason of Westfield.