<b>Fears that better access to records will burden cities and towns not borne out in other states</b>

Government watchdogs in Massachusetts and elsewhere say that the experience in other states shows that dire predictions about efforts to reform this state’s records laws are almost certainly hyperbole. The Massachusetts Municipal Association, a lobbying group for cities and towns, has warned that the bill would heap new responsibilities on local officials, limit the fees they collect, and potentially overwhelm small towns.

“I don’t get the sense that it has any devastating impact,” said Adam Marshall, a legal fellow at the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, a Washington, D.C., organization that tracks public records laws across the country.

Moreover, municipal officials in other states with stronger public records laws than Massachusetts —from Florida to California — told the Globe they thought the cost of providing public records is both manageable and an important democratic responsibility.

The debate over the cost of public access comes amid growing complaints about Massachusetts’ 42-year-old public records law, widely considered one of the weakest in the country. In the Bay State, agencies routinely take months to respond to requests, arbitrarily refuse to release information, or demand thousands of dollars for basic records.

To strengthen the law, Representative Peter Kocot, a Northampton Democrat, sponsored a bill to reduce the fees that agencies can charge for copies, allow citizens to obtain documents in electronic form, and impose fines on organizations that refuse to comply.

The bill appears to have significant support in the Legislature and from more than 40 advocacy groups, including the Massachusetts chapters of Common Cause and the American Civil Liberties Union, even though some worry the reforms don’t go far enough.

But the loudest complaints have been lodged by the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which raised objections to virtually every major provision in the bill and helped prompt the Legislature to put off a House vote until they can modify the language to address the concerns.

Geoffrey Beckwith, the association’s executive director, said his group doesn’t oppose the idea of updating the law, but he said the group is worried the legislation could be too costly for cities and towns to implement.

“There has got to be a way to balance it, because there are other services communities have to provide,” Beckwith said.

The Globe couldn’t find any studies that might indicate the cost to implement the law or how much more government agencies spend in states with stronger public records laws.

But some local officials in Massachusetts have expressed particular concern about provisions that would bar agencies from charging fees to locate and review documents, except in cases of unusually large information requests, and enable citizens to obtain fee waivers in some cases. They also dislike a provision capping fees for copies at 5 cents per page, rather than the current 20 to 50 cents.

The town clerk in Freetown, a Southeastern Massachusetts town about the same size of Oak Hill, W.Va., predicted the law would cut the agency’s revenue and encourage people to file a wave of ridiculous requests.

“I might as well change the sign on my office from Town Clerk to Public Records,” wrote the clerk, Jacqueline Brown, in an e-mail to other town clerks across the state. “If this law passes, the absurd requests we get from the news media for all communities will become ludicrous.”

In an interview, Brown said her office would comply with any changes, but “we don’t have to be happy about it.”

Springfield has similar worries. The city collected $17,000 from 450 public records requests over the past year and a half. But a spokesman said the city is concerned its lawyers will have to do more work for less money if the bill becomes law — amounting to an “unfunded mandate” — though public records fees account for a negligible part of the entire $582 million city budget.

Still, clerks in states with stronger public records laws say they’ve been able to provide information to the public without having to slash other city services.

For instance, the city of Naples, Fla., said it has logged more than 1,000 requests for documents this year, but found the volume manageable. Instead of filtering every request through the legal office, as some cities do, Naples has trained workers throughout the city to provide documents to the public.

“We look at it as part of our job,” said Patricia Rambosk, the city clerk of Naples, which has a population of around 20,000. “There is someone in every department trained as a records coordinator.” And most of the records are provided free, Rambosk said, unless they require half an hour or more to collect or citizens want a large number of paper copies instead of a CD-ROM or e-mail.

Naples has speeded up the process by allowing citizens requesting records to fill out an online form, rather than sending a formal letter.

California law limits the amount that government agencies can charge for documents even more strictly than Florida. In California, government agencies are not permitted to charge any fees at all for locating and redacting documents. Instead, they can only charge for paper copies — and even that has become rarer as cities increasingly provide records via e-mail.

Wendy Klock-Johnson, the assistant city clerk in Sacramento, said she oversees a team of five people in her office dedicating to answering requests from the public for everything from city council minutes to memos. “It sounds large, but the city has 4,500 employees,” she said.

She said the city has mostly been able to avoid overly broad requests simply by talking to people and helping them zero in on the information they are really looking for. In Massachusetts, by contrast, agencies often send citizens bills for thousands of dollars or more for requests they regard as overly broad.

“The first thing we try to do is narrow the request,” Klock-Johnson said. “It’s pretty effective.” She could think of only a single instance when her office had to reject a public records request because it was too massive.

So far, West Virginia officials said they hadn’t heard of any abuses in the state since they overhauled their law last month.

The West Virginia law bans agencies from charging any labor fees to retrieve documents, broadens the definition of public records, and requires the state to create a centralized database of records requests. The Legislature approved the bill after complaints that some agencies were charging as much as $200 per hour to review and redact documents.

Some local governments and organizations had unsuccessfully urged Governor Earl Ray Tomblin to veto the measure. The West Virginia Association of Counties told the governor that “requests are very burdensome and time-consuming for offices with small staff.”

Patti Hamilton, executive director of the association, said there have been some minor issues since the bill became law, such as confusion over how much they can legally charge for paper copies.

But Tim Armstead, speaker of the state’s House of Delegates and a key sponsor of the bill, said he has “not heard from anyone expressing concerns about the fee reductions since the bill took effect.”

Kelvin E. Holliday, the county clerk in Fayette County, said he receives about one records request a month, same as he did before the new law. He said he usually lets citizens look through the files and pick out what they want copied.

“Everything in my office, other than employee files, is an open public record,” said Holliday.