By Morgan Chilson, Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — The Kansas Senate Committee on Government Efficiency spent the first minutes of its Tuesday meeting explaining why it delayed release of messages to news organizations, defying Kansas Open Records Act requirements.
Sen. Renee Erickson, a Wichita Republican and chairwoman of COGE, said news articles had been written about the subject, and she felt it was important for the committee to hear what occurred.
Max Kautsch, a First Amendment rights and open government attorney, said COGE failed to meet requirements laid out in the law, specifically that records should be made available as soon as possible.
Kansas Reflector made an open records request to access submissions to the COGE portal and email address. The records were not released for more than two months after the request, although Sen. Patrick Schmidt made a KORA request for those records and received them well before that.
KORA requires records be made available within three business days or as soon as possible.
The two-month timeline could have met KORA requirements if, as the law requires, there had been a “detailed explanation of the cause for further delay,” Kautsch said.
Gordon Self, a legislative staff member who specializes in statutes, said the portal where people could submit suggestions for COGE indicated those “may be” public records. When KORA requests were received, there were concerns the submissions might contain protected or confidential information, such as Social Security numbers or personal health information, he said.
To complete a submission on the COGE portal, a checkbox requires that the individual acknowledge the records are public records and subject to the law.
“Once the KORA requests were received and a response was made, there was a review of the records, all 2,000, to determine if any of the records did contain information,” Self said. “After a thorough review, there were some identified that did have some sensitive information in them.”
That information was redacted, he said.
Kansas Reflector received a copy of the emails from an unnamed source before the KORA request was fulfilled.
The official copy received later showed few redactions and most appeared to be names, addresses and phone numbers.
The Reflector’s request yielded disclosures of more than 1,600 submissions that Kansans had made to the portal, Kautsch said. The names and contact information for just 55 submitters were redacted, while the names and contact information for 1,500-plus Kansans were disclosed.
“I thought it was important because there’s been a lot of articles and things out on social media – I thought it was important that this committee hear the process, the rationale for the process,” Erickson said after Self’s presentation. “At the end of the day, there are none that have been deleted, there are none that are not available for review. But as was said, we wanted to make sure that we were not including information that was not appropriate for such a situation.”
