By LAVENDRICK SMITH

WNPA, Olympia News Bureau

A bill aimed at defanging abusive and profit-minded public records requestors at the state Legislature appears to be dead.

House Bill 2576 would have given local agencies the power to limit the time they spend each month responding to public records requests, and allow local agencies to charge a fee for providing public records that are requested for commercial purposes. It did not make it out of committee this week.

Rep. Joan McBride, D-Kirkland, the bill’s sponsor, said the bill wasn’t meant to undermine transparency in local government, but instead help limit what she calls the “one percent” of requests that amount to harassment of taxpayer-supported public agencies.

“This is a very modest bill and a good, elegant, first step in talking about public records,” McBride said Jan. 28 at the bill’s hearing in front of the House Local Government Committee.

The bill received wide support from officials in local government agencies, who say they don’t have the necessary staff to deal with some of the broadest requests from private companies and citizens, and are upset that they can’t recover the costs for providing large volumes of records.

The South Whidbey School District complained last year that it was overburdened by broad and superfluous requests. Officials claimed it was such a big problem that they began identifying requestors in an online document, saying it was meant to help convey the related financial expenses to the board. The policy was later rescinded.

Langley has also struggled under the weight of records requests. In 2015 the city allocated additional resources and made internal changes to improve its response to public records requestors, but staying ahead remains a challenge, according to Debbie Mahler, the city’s designated public records officer. She’s frustrated that the bill didn’t gain more traction, but isn’t surprised.

“I was pretty sure the Legislature wouldn’t do anything… that they’d chicken out,” Mahler said. “They don’t seem to be able to balance the need for transparency and stopping abusive requestors. It’s getting pretty old.”

Pat Fitzpatrick, deputy city attorney in Kent, said he supported the bill as it created a way for local agencies to recover the costs of providing the broad records requests for profitable use from private entities.

“Cities, universally, are in support of the Public Records Act,” Fitzpatrick said. “What we are not in support of is private corporations making profit off the backs of citizens.”

Diana Carlen, a representative of LexisNexis, a software company that provides customers with public records, said most of the company’s clients need the records for information on things such as local government, law enforcement and businesses. She said the bill would’ve forced the company to pass the increased costs on to their customers.

“That is not going to stop the problem of overly broad and harassing requests,” Carlen said.

The proposal also would have created a commission to oversee disputes between agencies and requesters, and an account where 20 percent of the amount awarded to a requester in court against an agency would go to supporting the commission.

Opponents of the bill, including media members, said the bill weakened the Public Records Act, which was created by a citizen initiative in 1972.

Record editor Justin Burnett contributed to this story.