A West Virginia bill that was set to make last-minute changes to the state’s freedom of information law, allowing more copy fees, longer delays, and more secrecy, died this month before it reached Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s desk.

According to reporting from West Virginia Watch, House Bill 3412 passed out of the state’s Senate on April 11 with a vote of 25 to 9 but failed to receive a response from the House of Representatives in time for the end of the legislative session April 12.

Sponsored by House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, HB 3412 originally called for exempting the Legislature from the Freedom of Information Act.

Though that was later changed in the amended version, the bill would have significantly weakened the law by removing the requirement that the law be “liberally construed in favor of disclosure,”, extending the response time for FOI requests from five days to 14 days and allowing agencies to charge a “reasonable search and retrieval fee” for the documents.

While it also clarified that sensitive personal data like financial information, social security numbers, and date of birth would have remained private, the bill also stripped language that required state agencies to justify denials in court, transferring the burden of proof to the requester.

“It’s a good thing this bill died,” said David Cuillier, director of the Brechner FOI Project. “It would have essentially killed transparency in West Virginia.” 

Cuillier said that states with copy fees that enable agencies to charge for search and redaction time are the worst in the country. “Agencies can simply charge exorbitant fees and requesters go away,” he said. 

Also, a response time of 14 days would have been ludicrous – one of the longest lag times in the country, with only Maryland topping the list at 30 days. In the big scheme of things, response times don’t matter a lot, Cuillier said, since an acknowledgement of one’s request doesn’t mean the person receives the records by then. 

However, Cuillier said, shifting the burden of proof to the requester to show a document is public is completely backward from most public record laws, and that would have turned the law on its head. 

“The presumption in most parts of the world is that everything the government has recorded is open for us to look at, unless the government can point to something in the law that says otherwise,” Cuillier said. “It’s up to the government to prove something should be secret.” 

Posted: April 22, 2025
Category: Brechner News
Tagged as: Brechner FOI Project, FOI, Government Transparency, open records laws, public records