My heart starts racing when the latest issue of FYi arrives in my inbox. FYi is the quarterly newsletter of the Minnesota Department of Administration’s Information Policy Analysis Division. Despite its almost comically bureaucratic name, this agency’s work has a very real influence on how much we can find out about the activities of government in Minnesota. This is the agency that fields complaints about government hiding public records or elected officials meeting in secret.

The latest FYi newsletter details the highlights of the Legislature’s 2008 Data Practices Act revisions, among them:

“Increases the possible award of exemplary damages for a willful violation of the Data Practices Act. Threshold now is $1,000 (up from $100) and ceiling now is $15,000 (up from $10,000).”

“Prohibits the use of Social Security numbers on the face of mailings to or from government entities.”

“Requires that all closed meetings of a public body be electronically recorded at the expense of the public body.”

Then I get to my favorite feature: the blurbs about advisory opinions of the Commissioner of Administration Dana Badgerow. When people file a complaint about a perceived violation of the Data Practices Act, the commissioner can issue an opinion that essentially sets state policy, barring any successful challenges. In my view, those decisions too often have been falling on the side of sealing records from public scrutiny. This quarter looks a little more promising: all four of the opinions cited held that at least some of the records were public.

When I went to the listing of recent advisory opinions, there were some other interesting cases:

08-015: In February, the Roseville City Council did not comply with a provision of the Open Meeting Law when it failed to include the city manager’s email message about a proposed revocation of a liquor license in its publicly-available agenda packet. In her ruling, Badgerow described as “absurd” the Roseville council attorney’s argument that the law only applied to “printed materials,” not electronic messages.

08-018: Badgerow rules that the Open Meeting Law applies to the Drug Formulary Committee, a state-appointed panel that advises the state Commissioner of Human Services about “providing medicine to the poor in Minnesota that are paid for with federal and state dollars.” The opinion also said the panel members can eat dinner together in private, as they typically do, as long as they don’t talk about committee’s business, although they’re “encouraged to gather in open areas rather than behind closed doors before each regular meeting to avoid the appearance of an [Open Meeting Law] violation.” Finally, Badgerow ruled, the panel members are allowed to look at non-public materials during a public meeting without making them available to the public.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under Public records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.