Open Meetings

All fifty states and the District of Columbia have enacted open meetings laws. These laws generally require state and local agencies, commissions, boards, and councils to provide advance notice to the public of their meetings, to permit any member of the public to attend them (although not necessarily to participate), and to provide minutes, transcripts or recordings of meetings upon request at little or no cost. While many of these laws are similar to the Government in the Sunshine Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act in certain respects, significant variation exists on a state-by-state basis.

Choose your state from the list below for state-specific information on open meetings laws. (Note: This guide currently covers only the 15 most populous states and the District of Columbia. We hope to add additional states to the guide at a later date.)

The Federal Advisory Committee Act ("FACA"), located at 5 U.S.C. App. 2, gives you a right of access to the meetings of federal advisory committees. Advisory committees are groups formed by the government to give advice or make recommendations to the the President of the United States or a federal agency. Their membership usually consists of a mix of government officials and private citizens with expertise relating to a specific issue of government concern. If an advisory committee improperly prevents you from attending or contributing to a meeting, or denies you access to documents prepared by or for committee members, you may sue the federal agency that supervises the committee in federal court. Among other things, you can obtain a court order prohibiting future violations of FACA and a transcript of an improperly closed meeting.

Meetings Covered

FACA entitles you to attend many government meetings, but it does not apply to every gathering of every government body. There are two important limitations: the law only applies to the meetings of certain types of committees, and it only applies to certain kinds of gatherings. Below we take up these issues in turn.

What Government Bodies Are Covered?   read more »

The Government in the Sunshine Act ("Sunshine Act") governs the right of access to federal agency meetings. Congress passed the Sunshine Act motivated by the idea that citizens have a right to know how the government makes decisions that affect the public interest. The Sunshine Act allows you to attend meetings in which federal agency heads deliberate on agency business. It requires all federal agencies governed by “collegial bodies” to hold open meetings and to provide sufficient notice to allow the public to attend those meetings. The term “collegial bodies” refers to groups of two or more decision-makers that act jointly, such as boards of directors or multiple commissioners. Agencies covered by the Sunshine Act include powerful and important bodies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as lesser known agencies, such as the Marine Mammal Commission, the Railroad Retirement Board, and the Advisory Board for Cuba Broadcasting.

If a covered agency has improperly prevented you from attending a meeting, you may sue the agency in federal court. Among other things, you can obtain a court order prohibiting future violations of the Sunshine Act and a transcript of an improperly closed meeting.   read more »

Federal, state, and local governments often act through agencies, boards, committees, and other government "bodies." The most familiar examples of these kinds of government bodies are found at the local level -- they include school boards, city councils, boards of county commissioners, zoning and planning commissions, police review boards, and boards of library trustees. At the state level, examples include state environmental commissions, labor boards, housing boards, and tax commissions, to name a few. The executive branch of the federal government carries out its business through a number of agencies, many of which are governed by multi-member boards of directors or commissioners. Examples include the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Election Commission, and the Federal Housing Finance Board. A common feature of these agencies, boards, commissions, and other government bodies is that they meet as groups to deliberate or take action on public business. For instance, town zoning boards pass new zoning regulations and approve site plans, and state labor boards adopt workplace safety rules.   read more »

This section of the legal guide outlines the wide-array of information available to you from government sources. These sources range from your local city council all the way up to the largest agencies in the federal government. In fact, you might be quite surprised at how much information is available to you. And the best part is that you generally don't need to hire a lawyer or file any complicated forms -- you can access most of this information simply by showing up or filing a relatively simple request. Moreover, you don't need to be a professional journalist to share what you find with others who are interested in these issues; with nothing more than an Internet connection, you can make the information available to anyone in the world. For an impressive example of how some people are using the power of new information technologies in conjunction with government information, check out Adrian Holovaty's Chicagocrime.org, a browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago.

Regardless of what you publish online, it is likely that at least one (if not many) of the information sources we discuss in this section will be valuable to you. For example, you might want to find out whether the drinking water coming out of your faucet contains pollutants (information that is likely contained in documents held by the Environmental Protection Agency or one of its state counterparts). Perhaps you'd like to know more about how your local school board makes decisions (information that you can get by attending school board meetings). Or perhaps you are concerned that a real estate developer may have been sued for fraud (information that is available by visiting the courthouse in person or accessing the court's electronic docketing system).   read more »

Note: This page covers information specific to Washington. For general information concerning the use of recording devices see the Recording Phone Calls, Conversations, Meetings and Hearings section of this guide.

Washington Wiretapping Law

Washington's wiretapping law is a "two-party consent" law. Washington makes it a crime to intercept or record a private telephone call, in-person conversation, or electronic communication unless all parties to the communication consent. See Wash. Rev. Code § 9.73.030(1). Whether a conversation or other communications is "private" depends on a number of case-specific factors, such as the subjective intention of the parties, the reasonableness of their expectation that the conversation would be private, the location of the conversation, and whether third parties were present. State v. Townsend, 57 P.3d 255, 259 (Wash. 2002). You should always get the consent of all parties before recording any conversation that common sense tells you is private.   read more »