Future uncertain for the WA State Sunshine Committee’s oversight of public records
A 15-year-old Washington state committee tasked with reviewing Public Records Act exemptions for the Legislature continued a discussion Tuesday about whether to dissolve the group entirely.
The purpose of the Sunshine Committee is to review all the exemptions from the Public Records Act to determine whether they should be maintained, eliminated or changed. They are tasked with issuing recommendations to lawmakers, but it is up to legislators to sponsor and introduce bills containing the recommendations and get them passed by the Legislature.
The state Sunshine Committee cited lawmakers’ lack of attention to the group’s recommendations as their reason for considering disbanding, as well as the fact that there is no funding for the group in the state budget, not even to cover parking when the group convenes in person.
“The thing that I want the committee to understand is that we have no compulsion on the Legislature, all we can do is make a report to the Legislature, we cannot compel the Legislature to do anything, or any singular legislator, to do anything,” said Rowland Thompson, a committee member who is a lobbyist for Allied Daily Newspapers. “All we have is the work product that we put out, and it has been fairly routinely ignored by the Legislature at various levels.”
Ironically, the Legislature would have to officially repeal the statute that created the committee through a recommendation by the group, but that won’t be possible until next year’s legislative session.
Sen. Jeff Wilson, R-Longview, a member of the Sunshine Committee, said during Tuesday’s meeting that he was interested in drafting a bill to repeal the statute and that he had emailed staff to get the process started.
Other committee members were in support.
“We can’t go away on our own, the Legislature has to make that happen,” said Rep. Larry Springer, D-Kirkland, a member of the committee. “One of the questions we have to ask ourselves is, if that is our recommendation, what do we do between now and if it is repealed? So we should not lose sight of the fact that we may still exist even if we decide we don’t want to anymore.”
Rep. Jenny Graham, R-Spokane, a member of the committee, said over the last few years that the Legislature has been inundated with other tough issues and was not able to get to bills recommended by the Sunshine Committee.
But Linda Krese, a former Snohomish County Superior Court Judge and current chair of the Sunshine Committee, pushed back on that statement, and said that lawmakers have long been ignoring the recommendations.
Despite the fact that the Sunshine Committee issued only two recommendations during the 2023 legislative session, no legislators chose to sponsor bills addressing either of them. Since the Washington Supreme Court held that lawmakers are subject to the Public Records Act in 2019, no proposed legislation from the committee has been passed.
In a letter to Gov. Jay Inslee’s Deputy General Counsel from February, Krese said she would not be seeking reappointment to the position because she didn’t want to continue volunteering for a “purposeless committee.”
Once Krese steps down, the committee will not have a chair or vice chair, and it is unclear if those positions can be filled before the committee’s next meeting in August, or even to take the positions until the committee can potentially be removed via statute.
Still, some members wanted to make it clear that they weren’t giving up on the committee because they don’t believe in transparency, but because they are frustrated with being ignored after committing time to the group and the recommendations.
Krese noted during the February meeting that when the committee was enacted by law in July 2007, just over 300 public records exemptions existed in statute. That number has grown to more than 600 since then, and Krese said she suspects there are more that have been overlooked.
Kathy George, an attorney and a former member of the committee, stepped down during the February meeting over similar frustrations.
The move by legislators to ignore recommendations from the Sunshine Committee comes as state lawmakers are also using a legally untested exemption to shield themselves from releasing public records.
