ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 12, 1997 TAG: 9701130059
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
Suggesting that the law is rife with loopholes, a state delegate from Petersburg has introduced legislation calling for a yearlong study of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.
But the General Assembly is unlikely to consider the matter seriously unless legislators have hard evidence that something is wrong with the existing law, a key state lawmaker told journalists at the Virginia Press Association's annual meeting Saturday.
Del. Jay DeBoer, D-Petersburg, introduced the resolution at the opening of the General Assembly on Wednesday.
Enacted in 1968, the statute requires that elected and appointed government bodies hold meetings in public, except under 23 specific circumstances. It also guarantees the public access to documents held by their governments, with 63 specific exceptions.
DeBoer, generally regarded as one of the legislature's champions of open government, could not be reached for comment.
But in the resolution, he wrote: "The importance of the right of the people in the Commonwealth to have free access to the affairs of their government cannot be understated."
The resolution notes that computers have revolutionized the way government collects and stores information in ways that may limit the public's access.
Meanwhile, the General Assembly has added so many exemptions to the originial law that it has been "diluted to the point where the rule is found in the exception," DeBoer wrote in the resolution.
The legislation seemed to get favorable reviews from journalists when it was outlined Saturday at the Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center during a VPA workshop on the Freedom of Information Act.
But House Majority Leader Richard Cranwell said it may not be worth the paper it's written on unless the media and public convince legislators that the current law is seriously flawed.
Cranwell suggested that journalists collect instances of public officials flouting the law and present the list to the General Assembly.
"You're going to have to have some specific examples, and there's going to have to have been a practice of abuse," Cranwell told the workshop.
Some reporters and editors present argued that public officials should be personally fined for violating the law. They voiced doubts that officials would heed the statute unless judges routinely penalized violators.
The law currently requires judges to impose fines of $25 to $1,000 if it is determined that a violation was intentional. No fine is imposed for unintentional violations. In practice, fines are very rare.
Cranwell argued that there also are intangible penalties public officials face when they're found in violation.
"Assuming that every elected official... wants to be re-elected, there is a sufficient penalty," he said. "That's sure going to be used against you in the next election."
Sen. Malfourd "Bo" Trumbo, R-Fincastle, said he might introduce a companion Senate resolution to DeBoer's.
"I'm not necessarily in agreement that [the law] is broken," Trumbo said. But he agreed that computers are vastly changing the field of government information.
"We're on the cusp of a new information age that's changing so fast we don't even know what it's going to look like yet," Trumbo said.
In recent years, legislatures in neighboring states have taken close looks at their public-meeting laws and significantly tightened them. North Carolina in 1994 cut its list of reasons to close meetings from 21 to seven.
In 1992, Maryland established an open-meeting compliance board to monitor how its open-meeting law was carried out by local governments.
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