Members of the MDDC Press Association made good use of the free member Hotline last year. The bad news is that members in all three jurisdictions struggle with the effects of "unfriendly" access laws and downright hostile public officials, or "custodians," as the Maryland law calls such people.

Each open records law starts by saying that all documents generated by public agencies shall be open. The "unfriendliness" comes in the exceptions. The Maryland law divides documents into three types: entire documents that shall never be revealed (e.g. adoption records); categories of information in documents that shall never be revealed (medical information); and categories of information that may be revealed, unless the custodian believes that publishing the information would be contrary to the public interest.

The D.C. Law is modeled after the federal Freedom of Information Act, and it creates nine categories of information that cannot be disclosed, like trade secrets, information of "personal nature" and law-enforcement investigatory records. Delaware follows the same pattern, creating 14 exemptions. All three laws allow the legislatures to create more exemptions to the open records law by adding secrecy requirements in other non-FOIA statutes. So, once the records access law is reviewed, the information seeker has only just begun to find all of the exceptions. To date, or at least to my knowledge, no one has catalogued all the exceptions to public records access in Maryland, Delaware or D.C.

Based on one year of experience with the MDDC FOI Hotline, it appears that no one exemption creates more problems than the others. Calls to the Hotline in this first year concerned Maryland officials' decision to deny access to all of these documents: a school consultant's report, a contract with a central service agency, a file on a former police chief, a settlement agreement with a school teacher, an ethics commission investigation, volunteer fire department financial records, a sealed construction bid and more. Notice, however, that these exemptions all involve the agency's relationship with someone performing public services. Yet the agency's first reaction is to deny "the customer" (the newspaper's readers and the government's taxpayers) to see the specifics concerning the relati

onship. Under the open meetings laws, it does seem as though the "legal advice" exemption to the open meetings laws is frequently used, and thus, an often abused exemption. Public officials act as if the presence of the agency's lawyer in the closed meeting room creates the "legal advice" exemption, and this is decidedly not so. For example, in an opinion issued this year, the Maryland Open Meetings Compliance Board ruled again that, while legal advice can be sought and given in closed sessions, policy deliberations about following that advice must be held in an open session, despite the agency's attorney's presence.

MDDC members should not believe access problems are "private" newsgathering problems in which no one else has an interest. This myopia is second cousin to the attitude among bureaucrats who believe that the public agency's business is "nobody's business." When the agency denies the access request or closes the meeting, that can be part of the story, the follow- up or sidebar, along with the official explanation of why the records you wanted could not be released.