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Committee amends and advances omnibus open-government bill with new obscenity exemption
Summary
The committee amended Senate Bill 70 to incorporate prior House CORA fee language, add an exemption for agency records that contain obscene material, clarify live-streaming expectations and remove a five‑minute post‑executive‑session grace period; the amended bill passed favorably out of committee.
The House Committee on Judiciary amended and passed Senate Bill 70 on Monday, an omnibus open-government measure that touches the Open Records Act (CORA), the Open Meetings Act (COMA) and related reporting requirements.
The committee’s amendment inserted language the House previously approved governing CORA fees and charges and added a new exemption to the Kansas Open Records Act: records of a public agency that “contain material that is obscene,” as defined in statute, will be exempt from disclosure. The chair said the change was requested by the attorney general’s office to avoid forcing agencies to produce obscene material in response to records requests related to enforcement of adult‑content compliance provisions the Legislature enacted previously.
The amendment also retained provisions already in the Senate bill that exempt certain formally closed investigations with no founded violations, change the date by which county or district attorneys report CORA/COMA complaints to the attorney general (moving the annual reporting from January 15 to October 15), and clarify that certain subordinate groups created by a public body are subject to open‑meetings requirements when a majority of their members meet.
On livestreaming, the committee adopted clarifying language requiring a public body that voluntarily elects to livestream a meeting to make all aspects of the open meeting available through the selected medium, but it added a carve-out stating that an unintentional technological failure that disrupts the livestream does not constitute a violation.
The committee also deleted a five-minute grace period for concluding executive sessions (the chair offered the deletion as a policy choice to require timely return from executive session). The group debated that deletion at length: some members supported the change on grounds of stricter adherence to posted times; others said a short grace period is a reasonable practice that avoids needless scrambles when meetings briefly overrun.
Representative Williams moved to pass SB 70 as amended; the committee approved the bill favorably for passage. Representative Carmichael asked that his vote be recorded as opposed to the amendment and final bill.
Committee members were advised that statutory changes to CORA exemptions are subject to a five‑year automatic review cycle; the committee also attached the statutory definition of “obscene” to the amendment record to clarify the scope of the new exemption.
