Tennessee to get open-records appeal office, but agencies will be able to charge for large requests

Tennessee is about to get its the "first major revision of its open records law in 25 years. The bill has been delivered to Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen, who is expected to sign it. “He’s been supportive of the bill throughout,” Frank Gibson, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, told Virgie Townsend of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

"The bill creates the Office of Open Records Counsel to deal with open records issues for local government and requires open records requests to be available within seven days," Townsend reports. "The bill also contains a temporary provision that will allow agencies to charge requesters for their actual time spent filling the request if it takes more than five hours," which seems to be a growing trend among states. Iowa officials recently enacted a three-hour rule.

Tennessee's open-records law has been ranked among the nation's worst. "Agencies don’t have a deadline for responding to records requests, custodians don’t have to provide a legal reason for denying records requests and citizens don’t have a place to go to find out how to acquire public records," Townsend writes. "Gibson said that the new bill remedies those problems." (Read more)