In a guest commentary in The Salt Lake Tribune, Brigham Young professor Joel Campbell says that a proposed new public record request law in Utah would hurt public access to records. “[The law]…would not only pay fees to cover the ‘actual cost’ of providing the records, but it also added new charges for overhead and administration. That would have undone Utah GRAMA’s current and narrowly drawn ‘actual cost’ provision, which is among the best in the United States.”
The proposed law would also allow public officials to decide what is “readily accessible”, creating a huge loophole that could be used to decimate chances of retrieving records. -db
From a commentary in The Salt Lake Tribune, April 23, 2011, by Joel Campbell.