State and local governments may be able to keep more information from public view, if a new bill sponsored by key members of Baltimore City?s delegation in Annapolis passes.
House Bill 615 and Senate Bill 549, currently in committee, would allow state government and municipalities to deny pubic information requests if the subject matter is related to any current civil litigation in which the government is the defendant.
The bill could make large swathes of government information currently available under the Maryland Public Information Act essentially secret, argued David Rocah, staff attorney for the Maryland Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“It?s ludicrous,” he said. “It?s beyond lubricious. As it is written now, anyone requesting information about anything subject to litigation would be denied,”
But city officials defended the proposed law, arguing it was a necessary to stanch a flood of requests.
“Law firms that are involved in litigation with the city use Information Act requests to burden the city legal office with additional paperwork,” said Sterling Clifford, spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon.
“It is a tactic used to intentionally overburden the law office,” he said.
Clifford said most of the information subject to the new law would be available elsewhere. “It will generally be available in court records, which are open to the public.”
Amending the law ? which gives the public the right to request and receive information from almost any government agency, subjectto very few restrictions ? would be a setback for transparency, another opponent of the law said.
“The presumption is the public has a right to public record; as introduced it would have the public go to court to get public information,” said Jack Murphy, executive director of the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, a regional trade group that represents newspapers.
“The bill as it was introduced would essentially turn the Public information Act on its head.”
“What the government seems to forget it that it?s called ?public information? because it belongs to the public, not the government. A citizen could have a good reason, bad reason, or no reason to request public information; it?s up to not the government to decide whether citizens have the right to see it or not.”
