Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, on Tuesday said he was at the table, along with Assembly leadership and staff for Gov. Scott Walker, for the drafting of a set of provisions passed by Republicans on the Legislature's budget committee that would gut Wisconsin's open records laws.
Republicans in the Senate plan to introduce an amendment abandoning those changes, along with a handful of others approved by the Republican-led Joint Finance Committee late last week. The Senate is set to take up the budget and a package of changes to the state's prevailing wage laws on Tuesday.
"It came from a number of different sources," Fitzgerald told reporters on Tuesday. "Some of them related to, certainly, the lawsuit that Sen. Erpenbach was involved in. There was some suggestions from the UW System on open records requests related to some of their research — and also kind of some issues, I think, related to the Legislature and the executive branch dealing with open records requests. So, was I there when it was being put together? Yeah, absolutely. I was there. We tried to put something together we thought that made sense. But it’s not going to be accepted publicly and that’s why we’re here pulling it back today."
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