The Arkansas State Legislature exempted records relating to the governor’s security from the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act on Sept. 14 during a special legislative session that also saw individual and corporate income tax cuts passed.
SB10, sponsored by Senate President Pro Tempore Bart Hester, R-Cave Springs, makes “certain security-related records exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act of 1967,” and also requires the Arkansas State Police to submit a quarterly report “identifying certain expenses” to the legislative council, according to the bill.
Legislators rewrote the bill several times during the special session. The original bill, SB9, would have added broader exemptions to the Arkansas FOIA retroactive to June 1, 2022, and made it harder for courts to award attorney’s fees to plaintiffs in FOIA lawsuits among other exemptions, and an identical bill was filed in the House.
The Arkansas FOIA is designed to increase government accountability and transparency, allowing Arkansans to request public records from government agencies; requiring any government meeting, formal or informal, to be a public meeting, and allowing plaintiffs who sue over FOIA violations and win to collect attorney’s fees from the court.
Rob Moritz, chairman of the Arkansas FOIA Task Force and journalism lecturer at UCA, said the original two proposals “are not in the best interest of the people of Arkansas and the timing of them being filed during a special session is inappropriate.”
Moritz said the legislature established The Arkansas FOIA Task Force, which evaluates bills and amendments in the legislature that would affect FOIA and gives a recommendation, in 2017 after an influx of FOIA-related bills.
“Discussing the FOIA and all these amendments in a special session, especially this quickly, we just said it was inappropriate to do,” Moritz said.
The proposals fell apart during the special session, leading to the bill being rewritten as SB10, with much narrower language about exemptions, no retroactivity clause and no change to how attorney’s fees are awarded, Moritz said.
Moritz said public records requests and a lawsuit from Little Rock attorney and blogger Matt Campbell, known for running bluehogreport.com, to the Arkansas State Police, are what likely caused the governor to call the unexpected legislative session on Sept. 8.
“He [Campbell] wanted to get information about a flight the governor took a few weeks back,” Moritz said. “State police, which has the information because it’s a state police plane that was used, they hemmed and hawed and only released it piecemeal, so he ended up filing a lawsuit against the state police for violating the FOIA.”
Gov. Sarah Sanders said in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, “Our current FOIA laws put me and my kids at risk.”
Moritz said, “It’s interesting because … the governor already has security. The state police, they follow the governor around 24/7, and the governor lives at the mansion, and they have security 24/7 … the security’s there.”
“The issue is like when the governor takes a plane ride,” Moritz said. “Right now, that information, where the governor is going, who the passengers are, we don’t have that information before it occurs. But after the fact, it’s always been public … because taxpayers pay for that.”
In a post on X, Sanders said SB10 is a “great starting place for making our government safer and more effective.”
SB8 also passed in the special session, which reduced the income tax rate for Arkansans making more than $24,300 a year from 4.7% to 4.4% and the top income tax rate for corporations from 5.1% to 4.8%. The bill also established a one-time tax credit of $150 for low to middle-income taxpayers.