LANSING, Mich. (MIRS News) – The bi-partisan effort by Sen. Ed McBroom (R-Waucedah Twp.) and Sen. Jeremy Moss (D-Southfield) to convince the prior legislature to adopt a long-awaited Freedom of Information Act expansion to the governor’s office and Legislature never reached the finish line.

Now with 54 new members in the Michigan House and turnover in the Senate, the two have decided, “we’re going to have to start over again from scratch.”

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McBroom reported the two have talked about this and agree that the next step will not be legislative debate but the formation of work groups to lay the foundation for that.

These groups would include the news media, open government advocacy groups and legislators, and those talks will take place over the next “three to four months until we get something out here in the middle of Spring maybe.”

While the composition of the legislature may have changed, two major hurdles to passing a new FOIA law remain, namely the Governor’s office and the Legislature itself.

“The administration is still very concerned about what FOIA and Open Meetings does to the Governor’s office, in particular, even though 48 other states do it just fine,” he reflects.

The two lawmakers also feel that impacting the legislature is “a more complicated solution” given the constitutional rights lawmakers have when it comes to speech and debate.

Other states have tried to thread that needle, and the Upper Peninsula lawmaker reports many of those efforts were “struck down and emasculated to be ineffective.”

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The two are hoping to craft an alternative “that no state has done (but) it’s challenging because this has never been done before.”

From his vantage point, McBroom considers this to be a no-brainer, but obviously others disagree, which is why the McBroom/Moss tandem has yet to produce a product that can get 56, 20 votes and the governor’s signature.