Utah’s open records law ‘under siege’
The future of Utah’s open records is in jeopardy, officials say.
In just two days, legislators will make their final decisions on several bills amending the Government Records Access Management Act (GRAMA) and changing the way the public can access important information.
“I think we’d be safe to say that we felt the state’s open records law was under seige this session,” said Joel Campbell, legislative monitor for the Utah Press Association. “We hope we’ve worked out some agreements with some legislators that some of these bills will not come forward.”
But Rep. Fred Hunsaker, who was a member of the GRAMA task force that created these pieces of legislation this summer, said the public needs to research the bills and form their own opinions.
“Don’t just rely on somebody else’s interpretation,” he said. “I think there can be a lot of misinterpretation.”
One of the bills that many lobbyists and newspaper outlets are concerned about is HB 258. It began when a Salt Lake Tribune reporter requested a list of the lawmakers’ phone numbers. In response, the Legislature passed a bill which not only puts the lawmaker’s “Blackberry” numbers off limits, but could allow government entities to make public only one phone number, address and e-mail address for an entire agency, school or city government, Campbell said.
“It’s like attacking a mosquito with an atomic bomb,” he said. “[The bill] has unattended consequences where they’re trying to fix a problem and went too far.”
However, Hunsaker said when GRAMA was first passed in the early ’90s, certain forms of communication, such as e-mail, were not a big issue. The question was how to handle e-mail when the majority of written contact between the government and public was by e-mail.
The bill was passed and signed into law by Huntsman in addition to another substitute bill, HB 188, limits closed access solely to mobile communication. But HB 188 still will not solve the problem of allowing government agencies to identify only one single number for all their employees, said Mike O’Brien, attorney for the Utah Media Coalition.
Another bill that is causing concern is HB12, sponsored by Rep. Douglas Aagard, R-Kaysville, which would make secret all communications between any elected official and any other person.
“This completely reverses the way it has been under GRAMA during the past 15 years,” said. “We think that’s a terrible closure of what’s a very vital part of government.”
If the bill is passed, the worst-case scenario resulting from the change would be for example, a waste contractor having secret negotiations with a government elected official, O’Brien said.
“There’s a way in GRAMA to protect privacy without taking this sweeping secrecy,” he said.
The bill is pending on the Senate floor and members of the coalition are working with Senate President John Valentine and Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. to fight the issue.
Since the coalition became involved, many of the members’ concerns have been resolved, but despite all their work, they won’t know if it paid off until March 2, O’Brien said.
“It’s hard to get the average citizen upset about these issues,” he said. “[The passing of all these bills] would have amounted to death by a thousand cuts; that’s why the media took the issue so seriously.”
In the beginning when the bills were being drafted, Hunsaker said many members of the task force wondered why they were making these changes in the first place.
“I think one of the first hurdles was to learn what was working and what wasn’t,” Hunsaker said.
During the several months it took to decide on the proposed changes, more than 100 people testified before the task force that something needed to be done.
“In the final analysis, it wasn’t a partisan issue, all the Democrats and Republicans supported the bills equally,” Hunsaker said. “I’m not sure just how it will turn out, but I’m not unhappy about the amendments.”
-mmackay@cc.usu.edu