During the last two meetings of the Maryland Public Information Act Compliance Board (PIACB) three recommendations were made by the body for statutory changes to the PIA and the scope of authority for the PIACB.

The PIACB reviews and resolves complaints related to disputes that arise under the Public Information Act in Maryland. This is a 5-member independent body that regularly sees the type of disputes that come up as well as how the nature and volume of requests have evolved over time. This includes the technology to both request information and fulfill those inquires. After hearing an overview of the Maryland PIA ombudsman’s annual report, ahead of its release, the PIACB members voted to recommend three legislative changes for the coming session that will be included in the report.

Of the three recommendations, two focus on clarifications for the legal requirements of a Maryland PIA request. A third recommendation expands the scope of the oversight allowed by the board. For the legal requirements, one recommendation is to expand the current definition of a public record to include not just documents made or received by a governmental unit, but also records made or received by “agents” of a governmental unit. The instance giving rise to the recommendation concerned documents created by and transferred between the outside counsel for a local government and the insurance carrier. Since the documents were not made or received directly by the local government they were not captured by the current PIA standards even though they were created in the transaction of public business according to the board.

The other recommendation that focused on clarifications, was as an update to the PIA that is consistent with how data handling has evolved since the PIA was established. The change specifically adds language to section 4-205 of the General Provisions article to specify that if the database that holds the information is capable of extracting the data that has been requested, then that does not count as creating a new document. This is an attempt to clarify what constitutes the creation of a new record, and delineate that from simply pulling a report from a database.

The last recommendation is the one related to scope of authority for the PIACB. This is a recommendation that has been suggested before and is being included again. The intent is to expand the boards oversight to include authority to review a custodian’s denial of a request for a fee waiver.

The final report for 2025 is forthcoming and will include these recommendations as well as a thorough recap of the boards works over the last year as well as that of the Maryland PIA Ombudsman’s Office.