Michigan senate committee advances FOIA expansion bills
LANSING, Mich. (CBS DETROIT) - Access to government communications could get easier if bills that passed the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee move forward.
"I think this is a historic moment, at least for the Senate, because it has been the Senate that has been the block on making this law," said state Sen. Sam Singh during the committee meeting Wednesday.
Under current law, the governor, lieutenant governor, and legislature are all exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which makes Michigan's state government among the least transparent in the country, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
But the bills that passed out of the Senate committee on Wednesday could change that.
"Our project here is to again lay the foundation to create a first-ever disclosure law for reporters and journalists and residents and citizens alike to request information from their government," said state Sen. Jeremy Moss.
If approved into law, Senate bills 669 and 670 would add both the governor's office and the state legislature to Michigan's FOIA laws.
Improving access to FOIA has been floating around the legislature for years. State Senators Moss and Ed McBroom worked on this issue when they were both serving in the Michigan House of Representatives in 2015.
"When we started talking about this, this wasn't the most popular issue in town," Moss said. "Going to our colleagues and saying, 'Release your emails upon request,' we had to build that case, lawmaker by lawmaker and issue by issue."
"I'll say that I think some of the reason it has been delayed is that most of the lawmakers, the majority, have really determined that their offices are exceptionally boring, so adding this extra layer of work for everybody's office is something that a lot of our colleagues weren't and still aren't very excited about," said McBroom.