LAWS: More secrecy and a resignation from Sunshine Committee

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The committee’s job is also to recommend which of those exceptions to take away or change. But George said that in recent years, lawmakers haven’t passed legislation to turn those ideas from the committee into law.

“The main reason why I’m terminating my membership is because I’m just spinning my wheels,” George said in an interview. “We can’t get a bill passed. We couldn’t even get a bill introduced. And it just doesn’t seem like the Legislature is likely to remove the exemptions.”

Committee Chair Linda Krese, a former Snohomish County Superior Court judge, started a discussion at the meeting — before George resigned — about why lawmakers weren’t considering the committee’s proposals.

When the committee was created in 2007, she said, there were about 300 exemptions to the public records law, which Washington voters had approved as a ballot initiative in 1972.

There are now at least 600 exemptions, Krese said.

“And frankly, if you look at the entire history of the committee, there’s been very little that has ever been taken up” by lawmakers, Krese said.

“We haven’t been really encouraged by the Legislature,” said committee member Lynn Kessler, a Democrat who served in the state House from 1993 to 2011, during the meeting. “They seem to be even going more toward being exempted themselves. So I’m not sure they really believe in open government, at least not for themselves.”