Right-to-Know Committee, Maine Municipal Association Team Up to Restrict Public Access to Government Records: FOAA

A state committee formed in 2005 to ensure compliance with Maine’s government transparency law — the Freedom of Access Act — has partnered with the Maine Municipal Association (MMA) to collect alleged examples of FOAA becoming too “burdensome” for town employees.

The request, emailed this week to Maine town clerks by the MMA’s Rebecca Lambert, aims to bolster the position of government officials and some members of the so-called “Right to Know” advisory committee that Maine’s FOAA is skewed to heavily toward transparency and taxpayer rights.

“The Right to Know Advisory Committee, established to oversee Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, is seeking information from municipal officials regarding public records requests that are burdensome or abuse the intent of the law,” Lambert said in her email.

[RELATED: Public Access Advocate Seat on Maine’s ‘Right to Know’ Committee Left Vacant by House Speaker…]

“Your responses will help the committee develop a solution that strikes a balance between access to public records and appropriate use of government resources,” she said.

Contrary to Lambert’s assertion that the Right-to-Know Committee was established to “oversee” the Freedom of Access Act (FOAA), the authorizing legislation for the committee explicitly states that its primary objective is to “ensure compliance” with government transparency.

The statute states:

“The Right To Know Advisory Committee, referred to in this chapter as “the advisory committee,” is established to serve as a resource for ensuring compliance with this chapter and upholding the integrity of the purposes underlying this chapter as it applies to all public entities in the conduct of the public’s business.” (emphasis added)

Maine’s FOAA, one of the weakest state transparency laws in the U.S., is still a crucial tool for voters, taxpayers, and journalists to access public records that politicians and government officials prefer to keep secret.

Maine’s public access law is weaker and more favorable to government bureaucrats than even the laws of Illinois and Maryland — two states not known for high levels of government transparency.

Yet in both of those states — unlike in Maine — government officials are required to turn over documents within a set period of time. In Maine, no such deadline exists. Government officials can wait months and even years before fulfilling requests, a tactic which is often deployed successfully to withhold information until it’s no longer politically damaging or newsworthy.

In recent years, the law has been undermined by state officials operating in bad faith, imposing unreasonably high fees on document requesters, and unnecessarily delaying document production in order to benefit narrow political interests.

Though many employees in the legacy media will admit privately that FOAA has become thoroughly abused and undermined by government officials, few are willing to speak publicly about it for fear of losing access to what little information press flacks make available in closed channels.

As detailed by a Maine Wire report this week, the Mills Administration has routinely avoided disclosure of public records, in some cases for 600 days or more.

Currently, the Governor’s Office and the Maine State Police are refusing to turn over records regarding Gov. Mills travel schedule during last December’s storms.

The MSP originally said those records would be available in March or April.

The latest effort by the advisory committee is just the most recent initiative undertaken by the Democrat-controlled government body that seems contrary to it’s intended purpose of keeping government accountable and open to voters.

In its 2023 annual report, the one of the committee’s action items included sending requests like these all government entities, so it’s likely that reducing the “burden” of transparency on government will be a big focus of the July 15 meeting.

Although the annual report nods to increasing cooperation between the media and law enforcement, nothing in the report mentions the brazen disregard and partisan discrimination some government entities display when it comes to FOAA.

In 2022, one member of the committee asserted that public records requests aimed at shedding light on public schools’ transgender accommodation policies amounted to “hate speech.”

Those comments were clearly geared toward building an emotional and ideological case against FOAA, which has increasingly become a politically polarizing issue in the state.

Ironically, despite emailing town clerks about “burdensome” citizen requests in advance of the July 15 meeting, the “Right-to-Know” committee has not updated its website to disclose that the meeting is actually taking place.

There is currently no way for the public to know that the meeting is taking place, where it is taking place, how they can attend in person, or how they can attend remotely.