GRAMA bill stalls in committee

A bill that could potentially restrict access to communications between elected officials and the general public failed to move out of committee Tuesday morning.

Members of the House Government Operations Committee, who voted 5-4 not to take action on HB12, worried that changes to the Government Records Access Management Act contained within the bill could become confusing and burdensome. Of particular concern was a provision that written communications, including e-mail, between an elected official and private citizen could only be made public if one of the parties allowed it.

"It seems so confusing to me," Rep. Stephen Clark, R-Provo, said. "I might have a hundred e-mails that I have sent or received. Will I have to go through and try to figure out which ones to save?"

Rep. Douglas Aagard, R-Kaysville, the bill's sponsor, said that the intent was not to muddle the GRAMA law, but to "balance the rights of the public to access and the right to individual privacy." The bill was the result of a yearlong task force.

It also was intended to address the particular problem of e-mail, which was barely used when the GRAMA law was originally passed 13 years ago. Ideally, it would give constituents the comfort to express their opinions and reveal any private information about an issue without worrying that the information may find its way into the public arena.

"We're empowering the public to decide if they want their communication made public," Aagard said. "Yeah, it's a little bit cumbersome, but we feel like there's a benefit to that."

The problem with allowing elected officials and private citizens to determine what is public is that sensitive information which should be public will be kept private, said Joel Campbell, a Brigham Young University journalism professor and representative of the Utah Media Coalition, of which the Deseret Morning News is a member.

For example, the e-mails between Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson and organizers of a peace rally that coincided with a visit by Pres. George Bush would have been kept private under the proposed changes, he said.

Instead of completely changing GRAMA, the current law should be kept in place with specific exclusions added as needed, Campbell said.

"This creates the potential for abuse," he said. "If a person wants to classify something, they can do so and GRAMA cannot even touch it. . . . This will reduce the number of records that are public."

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E-mail: jloftin@desnews.com