The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved a major rewrite of the state’s sunshine laws after engaging in give and take with advocates for more public access and openness in government meetings.
House Bill 397, the first major overhaul of the state’s open records and meetings laws in more than a decade, now goes to the full House before being considered by the Senate.
During a lengthy hearing, the Judiciary Committee turned back a proposal to create an ombudsman in the state Attorney General’s Office to oversee complaints of violating open meeting laws against public officials. But members agreed to some changes in HB 397 that satisfied advocates for open government.
“Amendments to the bill had weakened it over the last two weeks,” Tom Clyde, a lawyer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said after the hearing. The amendments approved Tuesday “restored some of the balance” that had been in an earlier version of the legislation, he said.
State Attorney General Sam Olens, who is pushing the initiative, applauded the committee vote and said he looks forward to the House’s consideration of the bill.
HB 397 would increase penalties for those who break the state’s sunshine laws, increasing maximum fines to $1,000 for an offense and to $2,500 for an agency that commits a repeat offense.
One amendment approved Tuesday could make it easier to obtain civil sanctions against open records or meetings violators.
Under a previous version of the law, a civil penalty could be imposed only if the governmental agency was found to have acted “recklessly.” The bill now would allow civil penalties when a governmental agency is found to have merely broken the law.
At the hearing, Clyde said the legislation would have extended attorney-client privileges so broadly that findings of lawyers hired by government agencies to investigate wrongdoing would have been exempt from the Open Records Act. The committee approved an amendment that would require the attorneys’ factual findings to be released to the public, so long as the agency was not under the threat of litigation.
The committee approved another amendment that would subject advisory bodies for hospitals to the Open Meetings Act.
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