In a continuing series on proposed and final changes to state public records laws, MuckRock’s For the Record column is going to Louisiana to understand potential changes there.

Across the country, MuckRock has tracked new legislation in Colorado and Kentucky and what’s next for public records laws in New Jersey, Utah and Arkansas.

Want to know how open your local government is? MuckRock provides guides for each U.S. state and territory, including average response time to a request, whether public records laws apply to the state’s executive and legislative branches and more.

Louisiana

What the bill would do:

Louisiana House Bill 461 would limit public access to a local government’s “active” negotiations in economic development projects.

The exemptions from Louisiana’s public record law would include “certain documents related to economic development negotiations by local government” and allows the documents to be deemed confidential if a person or a company “requests such confidentiality in writing detailing the reasons such person requests confidentiality and asserting that the negotiation is conditioned in whole or in part on the maintenance of such confidentiality.”

The bill would also exempt “records of expenses of the local government pertaining to the negotiation … until the negotiations are concluded.”

The local government would also be required to notify the public about the agreement of confidentiality. The government would have to “publish on its website and in its official journal a notice containing general information regarding each negotiation to which records are confidential” and would be required to publish “no later than ten days after the determination of confidentiality.”

Why it was introduced:

Introduced by state Rep. Steven Jackson (D-Shreveport), House Bill 461 “provides for the confidentiality of documents related to local and parish economic development projects.”

Jackson told the Louisiana Illuminator that he sponsored the bill because “when he served on a local government board, consultants from other jurisdictions would file public records requests to find out what incentives they were offering a business.”

Then those same consultants would “use the information for competitive purposes or to lure the project away,” Jackson said.

How Freedom of Information advocates view the legislation:

Many Freedom of Information advocates don’t agree with Jackson, and see House Bill 461 as another way to curtail Louisiana’s public records law.

Nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight released a statement from its interim executive director, Chioma Chukwu, condemning the new House bill.

“It provides politicians an alarming amount of leeway to conceal negotiations about business deals — paid for with taxpayer dollars — until those deals are finalized,” Chukwu said.

“The people of Louisiana have a right to know how their government is operating, and we condemn this effort to weaken Louisiana’s Public Records Law by giving local officials power to declare vital public documents confidential.”

What’s next:

The Louisiana House of Representatives passed House Bill 461 on April 11 and sent it to the state Senate for consideration.

The Update

• Changes to Kentucky’s public records law stalled: Kentucky House Bill 509 died in the state’s Senate floor on Monday, reports McKenna Horsley in the Kentucky Lantern. The bill would have made substantial changes to the state’s Open Records Act, including limitations to what public agencies would include in a public records search.

• Pennsylvania county accused of purposely delaying release of public records: In Pennsylvania, former county Chief Solicitor Justin McShane said that Dauphin County purposefully delays providing public documents and information and has done so for years, reports Joshua Vaughn in PennLive.

• Police reform in Virginia could affect public access to records: A new Virginia law grants additional powers to Virginia officials investigating law enforcement officers accused of wrongdoing, while also limiting public access to hearings and records, reports Sam Stecklow of the Invisible Institute, publishing in the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism.

FOIA Finds

• Reporting on web censorship in schools: Reporter Tara García Mathewson explains how the Markup was able to report on web censorship in schools by requesting a list of websites blocked by web-filtering software in the last 30 days from districts that have banned the most books in the 2022 to 2033 school year.

• Investigating lethal restraint: The Associated Press along with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism program at the University of Maryland and Arizona State University, and FRONTLINE filed nearly 7,000 requests for government documents and body-camera footage, as part of their lethal restraint investigation.

• Public records reveal scammers posing as SEC employees: Through a public-records request to the Security and Exchange Commission, Bloomberg’s Jason Leopold, writing in his”FOIA Files” column, describes how he obtained documents that reveal fraudsters have posed as commissioners and top officials and tricked victims into handing over tens of thousands of dollars.