Several bills expanding the Freedom of Information Act’s (FOIA) address exemption and creating an exemption for most records created by public universities were reported favorably out of Connecticut’s Government Administration and Elections (GAE) Committee on March 23. Similar bills have been voted out of committee in previous legislative sessions but have not reached final passage.
The committee also advanced a bill that would expand the state’s vexatious requester statute to allow consideration of threatening or harassing behavior outside of a FOIA request in decisions about whether public agencies can temporarily ignore requests from individuals who abuse public records requests.
In the committee’s final regularly scheduled meeting, a controversial bill to end the bipartisan membership of the legislature’s Regulation Review Committee also appeared on the agenda, but GAE took no action on it before adjourning.
Under the state’s current vexatious requester statute, requesters who abuse FOIA requests and use them primarily to harass public officials rather than retain records can have their rights under the law suspended for a year. A public agency can file a petition for relief against a vexatious requester to the Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC). If the FOIC finds the petition has merit, they can suspend the agency’s obligation to respond to requests from that individual for a period of a year.
Under the current law, findings that a requester is vexatious are based on a number of factors laid out in statute, including the number of requests that have been filed or are pending, their scope and language, communication about the request, and whether a requester has demonstrated a pattern of conduct that abuses FOIA or interferes with an agency’s operation.
SB 466, which was introduced earlier in March, expands the law to include the “nature, content, language or subject matter of other oral or written communications” and “threatening or harassing conduct that took place at or outside of the agency’s office regardless of whether such conduct was related to the request” in the factors the FOIC can look at in determining whether a requester is vexatious.
For repeat offenders, the bill would also allow public agencies to ignore requests for a period of up to three years.
The bill was advanced on party lines, with Republican committee members voting against advancing the bill.
Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, said he didn’t think he could ever support the bill “unless it was limited to the most egregious of circumstances.” Sampson added that he didn’t believe that access to public documents should necessarily be suspended because of the activities they were engaging in, drawing a parallel to the due process rights of murderers.
Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Windham, suggested that legislators could look at explicitly defining the terms “threatening” and “harassing” as they appear in the bill, using existing language in statute as SB 466 advances. The FOIC’s testimony on the bill encouraged legislators to define those terms.
GAE also voted to advance HB 5548, which expands the existing FOIA exemption for the residential addresses of certain public employees to cover all public employees unless their residency is a condition of employment. That bill and other bills expanding the address exemption, including a bill specifically aimed at teachers, have appeared in previous legislative sessions. This year, a bill to add public school teachers to the list of employees whose addresses may not be disclosed through FOIA was expanded to include all public school employees before being voted out of the Government Oversight Committee.
HB 5548 also includes a provision that would exempt all documents produced by public universities “arising out of teaching or research on medical, artistic, scientific, legal or other scholarly issues, including any such records of legal clinics or centers, but excluding any financial records of such institution.” Similar proposed exemptions have also appeared in multiple previous legislative sessions.
Republicans also opposed HB 5548. Sampson called the proposed exemption for public university documents “even more absurd” than the expansion of the address exemption.
“Their work belongs to the people of Connecticut,” Sampson said of public university employees. “If you do not want to be paid by the people of Connecticut, that’s fine, but as long as you are the work that you produce belongs to them and they have a right to take a look at it.”
GAE also voted to advance a substitute version of HB 5550, which exempts public university course syllabi from FOIA disclosure.
Rep. Matt Blumenthal, D-Stamford, said of the bill that syllabi were never “consciously included” in public records disclosable under FOIA and are only available now because they are frequently sent or stored on state-owned computers. Blumenthal added that HB 5550 would restore FOI’s original intent, which did not include those records.
Sampson disputed Blumenthal’s characterization, and Republicans again opposed the bill.
HB 5528, a bill to study state agency response times to FOIA requests, was also advanced out of committee with bipartisan support. A similar bill has also appeared in previous legislative sessions but has not reached final passage.
GAE took action on every bill on its agenda except for a proposal to change representation on the Regulation Review Committee to be in proportion to the number of major and minor party legislators in both chambers. Currently, party representation on the committee is equal. Hundreds of pieces of testimony opposing the bill were filed, including by Republican legislators, who would be most affected by the proposed change.
Transparency Note: Katherine Revello is a member of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information (CCFOI) board of directors. CCFOI submitted testimony on several of these bills.
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