{"id":33989,"date":"2016-03-14T08:02:33","date_gmt":"2016-03-14T15:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/policy-lets-legislators-decide-on-records-releases\/"},"modified":"2016-03-14T08:02:33","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T15:02:33","slug":"policy-lets-legislators-decide-on-records-releases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/policy-lets-legislators-decide-on-records-releases\/","title":{"rendered":"Policy lets legislators decide on records releases"},"content":{"rendered":"

JUNEAU \u2014<\/strong> Legislative policy leaves Alaska state lawmakers the discretion to decide whether they want to release information from their own records. That stands in contrast to the rules concerning records in the governor\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

As part of a national project, The Associated Press requested the daily calendars and emails of four top state legislative leaders for the week of Feb. 1 through Feb. 7. The goal was to understand what the rules are in each state \u2014 what is releasable and what is not.<\/p>\n

In Alaska, the requests were sent to Senate President Kevin Meyer, House Speaker Mike Chenault, Senate Minority Berta Gardner and House Minority Leader Chris Tuck. The same request also was sent to Gov. Bill Walker\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

Meyer, R-Alaska, provided a copy of his calendar and allowed a reporter to look over an aide\u2019s shoulder to see how his email inbox is sorted. Meyer said he didn\u2019t have a problem with characterizing the nature of the emails he received but said confidentiality is also important.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople send us an email and they think we\u2019re going to keep it to ourselves and we try to do that as much as we can,\u201d he said. \u201cBut on the other hand, this is state property.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gardner and Tuck, both Anchorage Democrats, responded by providing the legislative policy. Chenault, R-Nikiski, ultimately requested an opinion from the legislature\u2019s top attorney on the disclosure rules. Chenault cited confidentiality concerns with the emails, too, saying they can contain private constituent issues.<\/p>\n

The attorney, Doug Gardner, said the short answer to whether calendars or emails sent or received by a legislator are public records available for disclosure is no.<\/p>\n

He noted legislative policy that says that a legislator\u2019s records, while in that legislator\u2019s possession, are not public records based on deliberative process privilege and a constitutional provision of legislative immunity. The records\u2019 policy, however, allows each legislator, at his or her discretion, to choose whether to release information from their records.<\/p>\n

Walker\u2019s office provided a copy of his calendar and was winnowing down the initial request for emails to search terms requested by the AP. The initial search turned up more than 1,000 pages, according to Angela Hull, the public records specialist for Walker\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

State regulations set out a timeline of 10 working days for executive branch agencies to respond to records requests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JUNEAU \u2014 Legislative policy leaves Alaska state lawmakers the discretion to decide whether they want to release information from their own records. That stands in contrast to the rules concerning records in the governor\u2019s office. As part of a national project, The Associated Press requested the daily calendars and emails of four top state legislative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-33989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33989\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33989"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=33989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}