Wyo. open meetings/records woes

Shawn Whitman, chief of staff for Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, said closing a meeting was "an unfortunate misunderstanding on our part of the state statute," the AP reported. A Barrasso staffer told reporters that the meeting at a restaurant was private though it was being attended by a quorum of Fremont County commissioners.

Closing a meeting to the public between staffers for Sen. John Barrasso and Congresswoman Cynthia Lummis and a quorum of Fremont Count commissioners was a mistake. That’s was Barrasso’s chief of staff Shawn Whitman said Wednesday in response to an allegation by open-government advocates that the press was illegally barred from the gathering.

More here.

Update on Wind River Indian Reservation case:

Fremont County Coroner Ed McAuslan said he's bound by federal law to not release details on the deaths of three girls on the Wind River Indian Reservation, KVOW/KTAK reported. Wyoming Sen. Cale Case has said he's drafting legislation to make coroner records open, but McAuslan said that won't affect this case, which is governed by federal law. McAuslan said he will not violate laws and face a fine and/or jail time for releasing information.

Fremont County Coroner Ed McAuslan said he will not risk jail time by divulging information about a federal case involving the deaths of three girls last year on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Fremont County.

His comment comes on the heels of Republican Sen. Cale Case’s recent announcement he’s drafting state legislation that would specify all coroner records be open for public review unless privileged or confidential by law.

McAuslan said Case notified him this week by email of his intentions to draft the disclosure of information bill.

More here.

An Important Story Often Overlooked: The Many Other Statutes That Hide Things

Here is a great story from my pal Kirsten Mitchell on an often overlooked issue: the many statutes that work like mini-exemptions in federal law. This is a story that ought to be replicated over and over in state after state!

Government information as wide-ranging as the names of people who grow watermelons or olives, information on tax returns, and the location of endangered plants and large caves is shielded from Americans under at least 140 provisions scattered throughout federal law.

Their use by federal departments to deny access to government information more than doubled between 1999 and 2006, according to data compiled from each department.

The provisions’ oft-buried fine print carves out exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act, a 42-year-old law that presumes public access to information from government agencies and lays out nine categories of information that the government may keep secret.

One of those nine is a catchall exemption which requires shielding government records that are specifically exempt from FOIA by federal law. Critics contend that the exemptions erode government transparency.

The exemptions “just have a tendency to chip away at the presumption that information is supposed to be public,” said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, an independent nongovernmental research institute at George Washington University in Washington.

Dozens more catchall exemptions are being proposed in Congress, tucked into legislation for everything from bolstering the safety of the nation’s food supply to increasing security at wastewater treatment plants...

At least two dozen bills contain proposed special exemptions to FOIA. No one has an exact count, because they are difficult to track. Sometimes the proposals reference FOIA by citing “section 552 of title 5” of the U.S. Code. Other times, the language is more ambiguous, deeming that information shall be confidential or shall not be disclosed to the public.

Current proposals include exempting from FOIA a congressional advisory commission on world trade disputes, the identities of people who report illegal immigration and records related to railroad carrier plans to make the nation’s rails safer.

More here.