Committee tackles public-access law Audit a year ago found compliance uneven

AUGUSTA – One year to the day after a surprise test of the state’s public-access law found spotty compliance among state and local officials, a legislative committee charged with revamping the law gathered at the State House on Wednesday to begin its work.

“There’s a great deal of confusion in government and in the general public about the law,” said Judy Meyer, an editor at the Lewiston Sun and member of the Maine Freedom of Information Coalition, which organized the surprise November 2002 audit that exposed inconsistencies in how local police, school and municipal officials complied with requests to see public documents under the law.

The Committee to Study Compliance with Maine’s Freedom of Access Laws was created in the aftermath of the statewide audit in order to recommend ways to improve the Right to Know Law, designed to ensure public access to government meetings and records.

The committee, which is expected to report its findings to the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee in early January, will study several aspects of the law, including whether town governments, police and school departments should be required to adopt written policies on how to follow the law.

“It shouldn’t depend on who’s at the front desk,” Meyer said, noting a wide variety of responses to auditors’ identical requests for public documents including government expense sheets, contracts and police records. “And where you live shouldn’t determine how much access you get to information,” Meyer said.

The committee also will study whether the Legislature should place limits on how much a government agency can charge for copies of public records, the price of which, the audit found, ranged from 10 cents to $8 a page at some police departments.

“I’m not justifying it, but with more demands being placed on government, they’re going to see if they can take in some revenue,” said Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Maine Chiefs of Police Association and a member of the study committee.

Police departments, about two-thirds of which complied with auditors’ requests to see the daily police log, were the quickest to respond to the results of the audit by convening several training sessions to educate department heads about the law.

“I’m sure [the training] didn’t take care of the situation, but it went a long way toward that,” Schwartz told his fellow committee members Wednesday.

Like Schwartz, representatives on the committee from school and town governments were critical of several aspects of 2002 audit, in which hundreds of volunteers – essentially an equal mix of journalists and members of the general public – spread out across the state to request documents at more than 300 public offices.

“I don’t deny the issues, but some of the audit results could be misconstrued,” said Dale Douglass, an official with the Maine School Management Association.

Douglass noted in particular that the auditors’ requests for a copy of a superintendent’s contract, although a public document under the law, might not be as simple to grant as members of the Maine Freedom of Information Coalition would like. The contracts, he said, are often contained in confidential personnel files and sometimes contain private information such as a Social Security number that is not available to the general public.

Also as part of its duties, the legislative committee will explore whether some of the hundreds of exceptions added to the law since its creation in 1959 are still needed. Among the seemingly more obscure records exempted from the law include those relating to patented potato varieties and the minimum standards for planting potatoes.

“I think there are a lot of unnecessary exceptions here,” said Chris Spruce, a member of the public serving on the committee.

The committee also includes representatives from the Attorney General’s Office, the Department of Public Safety, the Maine Municipal Association and several news organizations.