Connecticut FOI Law Blogby Attorney Mark Dumas

Here’s an entertaining treat to close out Sunshine Week on the Connecticut Freedom of Information Law Blog.  The video clip is from Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s pseudo-conservative President of the United States of Funny.  The Local Open Government Blog summarizes the clip as well as you can in words.

Stephen Colbert presented an editorial on an open government story from Tennessee.  There, a Memphis newspaper has published an on-line database listing people with concealed weapons permits.  Colbert satirically rails against on-line access to public records because of a claimed invasion of privacy.

Enjoy.

I’ve written several times this week about Connecticut’s new law that requires municipalities post meeting notices and minutes on their websites. But if you don’t like the new law, you should remember that Connecticut’s Freedom of Information law is like New England weather.  If you don’t like it, wait a minute.

There are currently four bills before the General Assembly that would revise Section 1-225 of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act to limit the impact of the changes that occurred when Public Act 08-03 went into effect last October.  Three of the bills, SB-68, SB-87, and HB-5731 have been sent to the Committee on Government Administration and Elections and probably won’t be acted upon.  The fourth bill, SB-772, was approved by the Committee in a 13-2 vote on March 6th.  The bill has since been sent to the Office of Legislative Research and Office of Fiscal Analysis to be reviewed before it will eventually be considered by the full legislature.  Here’s what the GAE Committee’s Joint Favorable Report has to say about the bill:

Some municipalities have found the current seven day posting requirement for public agency meeting minutes (found in PA 08-3) to be onerous if not impossible to fulfill with available personnel and funds. Their subsequent fear of legal action in light of possible noncompliance has led to the shutting down of several municipal websites; municipalities have sacrificed a useful tool in order to avoid the costs associated with potential legal proceedings.

The substitute language (LCO No. 4561) changes the seven day requirement to fourteen days; changes the October 1, 2009 exemption end date to December 31, 2009 if such public agency files a notice with the applicable town clerk indicating the reason preventing compliance; and provides for further exemption (beginning January 1, 2010 and ending January 1, 2011) if such public agency files a notice with the commission describing the hardship that prevents such public agency from complying with the posting requirement.

But if you are looking for the full language of the bill on the General Assembly’s website, be careful.  As of today, the text that you will likely find isn’t the operative language in the bill.  You can read the current version of SB-772, the Joint Favorable Substitute bill,  on this blog thanks to our very helpful friend’s at the Legislative Commissioners’ Office.

The passage from the Joint Favorable Report that is quoted above provides the important details.  If the bill is passed, it will effectively give municipalities until January 2011 to comply with the most burdensome changes and will increase the amount of time cities and towns have to post minutes online from 7 days to 14 days.  But the bill does not delay or change the requirements that meeting schedules must be posted online or that special meeting notices must be on municipal websites 24 hours before the meetings are held.

Although the bill’s prospects look strong, municipalities should continue to comply with the new law until it is changed since it is possible that the bill could be defeated or fail to pass because of more pressing legislative business.

Last week, I told you about a great website created by the State of Utah that provides a centralized source for browsing and searching public meeting records for just about every state and local government entity.  I also mentioned that I would write more about the controversy surrounding Connecticut’s efforts to require local government notices to be posted online.  Today I will cover the the change in the law that started the controversy,  Public Act 08-3.

Public Act 08-3 amended Section 1-225 of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act to require that all “public agencies” post their meeting minutes, notices, and schedules on their websites.  In Connecticut, public agencies are broadly defined to include almost any government entity, including small towns and even some arts commissions.

In response to the change, many small towns cried foul, saying that the requirement was an unfunded mandate and that it was not feasible for towns that have volunteers manage their websites.  Harwinton was one of those towns and rather than absorbing the costs of a paid webmaster or a team of lawyers to defend FOIA complaints, the town shut down its website on October 1, 2008 — the date the new law took effect.

Harwinton First Selectman Frank Chiaramonte explained the town’s decision in testimony before the General Assembly’s Government Administration and Elections Committee on February 2nd.

I just wanted to preface my remarks by saying I’m all for giving out as much information as we can to our residents and the citizens of the state of Connecticut. What happened to us was we took down our website, actually, the day that the law went into effect. We happened to have a selectmen’s meeting, and we quickly realized that we were not going to be able to conform to the act, the seven days for posting the minutes and 24 hours for posting agendas.

We have a volunteer technology committee that was — that put the website up and was also putting the information on the website. One in particular, is somebody who is extremely busy, has his own — working his business, and was out of town a lot, and so the minutes got put up when they could. We had just defended two FOI complaints and we felt that we could not — we did not want to do that again. One of them cost the town, the taxpayers of the town, quite a bit of money to defend and we decided that we would take our website down before we had any complaints.

I think every town probably has some person or people who are the gotcha people, and as soon as you do something that is not on — in this particular case, in a timely basis, then they want to get you for it. And we decided it was time to take it down.

As of today, the Harwinton website is still dark, but several bills before the General Assembly may help change that, including one bill, SB-772, that I will discuss in more detail tomorrow.

Of course there is another solution that will provide online access to these public records without forcing an unfunded mandate on Connecticut’s cities and towns: a statewide public meeting notice website.  As I mentioned on Friday, Utah does it and as, I wrote in this Sunday’s Connecticut Post and Danbury News-Times, Connecticut should too.

The University of Connecticut’s college basketball teams may be number one seeds during March Madness, but the 2009 Survey of State Government Information Online ranks Connecticut a lowly 37th for online access to public records.  Connecticut was tied with Massachusetts and Maine.  Texas came in first and Mississippi came in last place.

The survey was prepared as part of this year’s Sunshine Week.  The Sunshine Week Committee’s full report goes into more detail, but here is what it has to say about Connecticut:

Connecticut: Anyone seeking financial disclosure reports from state officials in Connecticut must e-mail their requests, which are then considered for release at the discretion of the governor.

The survey included twenty categories of records.  Connecticut provides nine of those categories online.  Texas provides all twenty.  You can view a more detailed regional analysis on the Sunshine Week website.