Public-records access: Washington state not too bad, but it could be better

YAKIMA, Wash. — While the federal government grows less transparent, open-government advocates say Washington state is doing relatively well in providing access to public documents.

“I think we’re doing much better,” said Toby Nixon, Washington Coalition for Open Government president. “The (federal) Freedom of Information Act can take an extremely long time to get a record.”

But Nixon and Rowland Thompson, executive director of the Allied Daily Newspapers of Washington say there is room for improvement in Washington, and the are still efforts to close access to some public records.

Washington’s Public Records Act, which voters approved in 1972, now contains roughly 500 exemptions to its presumption of openness. While they are supposed to be narrowly tailored to specific situations, Nixon and Rowland said they can sometimes be overzealously applied by some records keepers.

And there is no shortage of proposals to add exemptions or put other hurdles in the way of releasing records.

“We’re always seeing efforts to roll things back,” Nixon said.

In November, voters approved Initiative 1501, which made in-home health-care workers’ contact information a private record. The initiative, touted as a measure to protect elderly people and their caregivers from identity theft, was promoted by the Service Employees International Union to keep the conservative Freedom Foundation from contacting workers about opting out of paying union dues.

This year state lawmakers proposed legislation that would shroud the selection process for four-year college and university presidents in secrecy, allowing trustees and regents to meet behind closed doors to select a new president, who would then be publicly confirmed by the Senate.

It would also exempt all documents related to the search process from public disclosure.

That bill, Senate Bill 5584, died in committee Wednesday.

But House Bill 1465 advanced to the Senate. If passed, it would allow the state to withhold the names of people reporting wolf attacks and the state wildlife officers responding to those attacks. Proponents say ranchers and wildlife agents have been harassed by opponents of killing predators.

Instead of closing off information on the actions of public employees, Thompson said those making the threats should be prosecuted under harassment laws.

Electronic records have also changed the face of public records requests. While it is easier to find records and send them, it also leads to more requests for records. Officials say that overburdens staffs and budgets, especially when high volumes of records are sought.

Nixon said some people file overly broad records requests, sometimes out of spite. They a minority, but they’re enough of a problem that lawmakers use them to justify imposing restrictions on records.

Last year, lawmakers considered allow government records keepers to limit how much time they spend on processing records requests, as well as prioritize which ones they would have to handle.

That bill never made it out of committee, but Nixon said it did lead to meetings between representatives of municipal government, records requesters and open-government advocates.

The result of the meetings were two bills. One of them, House Bill 1594 would require the state to provide training for local governments on how to manage records and handle requests, provide consultation through the Attorney General’s Office and investigate the possibility of creating an online public records portal to receive requests.

“I think the digital age is going to lead to consolidation,” Thompson said, to help smaller entities cope with the cost of electronic records management.

House Bill 1595 would establish fees for electronic records – from 10 cents a page for scanned documents to 10 cents per gigabyte of data transmitted electronically. A gigabyte is the equivalent of almost 65,000 pages typed in Microsoft Word.

While Nixon said the cost of scanning pages is a bit high, the fees are otherwise reasonable and should not deter most record seekers. It should, he and Thompson said, stop the “vexatious” requesters who ask for large amounts of documents, such as every email ever sent or received by every employee of an agency or a city.

“There has to be some modest fees,” Thompson said.

Both bills are awaiting committee hearings in the Senate.