PIERRE - (Argus Leader) - A House committee Wednesday killed an open-records bill that would require the government to justify denying public access to documents.

The measure raises too many questions about how records dealing with personal information, public safety or other sensitive issues would be treated, some opponents said.

“I think they need to go back to the task force and work on a bill that they can agree on there, then bring it back,” said Rep. Shantel Krebs, R-Sioux Falls, after the House’s State Affairs Committee killed the bill 7-6.

Sen. Nancy Turbak Berry, D-Watertown, sponsored the bill. She said after the meeting that although the vote was close, she doubted she’d try to revive it this session.

“I will keep working on it and hammering at it,” she said. “It isn’t finished by any means.”

She said opposition from Gov. Mike Rounds’ office helped kill the bill.

“Whatever we’d try to change at this point would be nitpicked word by word,” Turbak Berry said.

She served on a task force organized by Attorney General Larry Long that reviewed the status of government records in South Dakota. State law generally says records required by law to be kept are open. Numerous specific laws close different individual records or classes of records. But Long’s review found that a vast number of records fall somewhere between those two areas. It also found that government officials have wide discretion to make decisions on whether to open or close records.

The task force was unable to agree on a bill making substantive changes in open-records laws. Turbak Berry said her bill was gleaned from much of the work of one task force subcommittee.

Her bill would put the burden on government to show why a document should be closed.

“Unless there is a good reason that government can point to why a record is not open, then it is open,” Turbak Berry said. “Keeping things from you and me ought to be the exception, not the rule.”

Opponents said the bill was unclear in many areas and would require government officials to make judgment calls about release of records.

Jeff Bloomberg, Rounds’ commissioner of the Bureau of Administration, said the presumption in the bill is that government workers aren’t acting in good faith when they deny a record request. That isn’t so, he said.

Bloomberg also said the bill includes no provision to notify citizens that private information government may hold on them has been released to someone in a records request. That’s important because of how quickly information can be disseminated, he said.

“We’re talking about a day when any information, in a matter of seconds, can be put on one of those laptops and distributed worldwide,” Bloomberg said.

Mark Roby, publisher of the Watertown Public Opinion and a task force member, said the presumption law would help people get information from local governments.

“It isn’t good out there in the local government situation when you’re looking for information that people don’t want you to see,” he said.

Turbak Berry said she was surprised at why governments would want to keep records secret.

“Even here in friendly, decent South Dakota, we find that people who have power don’t want to share it, sometimes even with other elected people, and that’s a sad day in South Dakota,” she said. “Democracy isn’t always convenient, but it’s always right.”

House Republican leader Larry Rhoden of Union Center said the media often abuses access to open records, pointing to actions by the Argus Leader in 2006 to publish the names of concealed weapons permit-holders. The information was obtained before a law sealing those records went into place.

“That created a great deal of heartburn with me and it still does to this day, because the citizens of this state agreed that list should not be public and yet the newspaper, which is looking out for our best interests, let its own morals and its own set of standards take precedent over the will of people of the state of South Dakota,” he said.

The committee did pass a bill giving the state Office of Hearing Examiners authority to settle fights over government records.

The measure, which goes to the full House for action, is intended to give citizens seeking government records a place to go if their requests are denied or if they are told the documents would cost a great deal to provide.

Reach reporter Terry Woster at 605-224-2760.

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