A bill seeking to speed up the resolution of disputes over which government records should be open to the public appears to be dead for the session.

Senate Bill 3092 would have required the state Office of Information Practices to issue legal opinions within six months on all demands for public records and complaints about alleged violations of the state’s open-meetings law.

The bill is pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Chairman Brian Taniguchi said he won’t hold a hearing to consider the measure, in part because he thinks the proposed six-month time limit is arbitrary.

“I don’t really believe in doing that kind of stuff, setting up arbitrary kind of (timelines). Six months? What about three months? What about one year? How do we base that kind of stuff?” Taniguchi said.

Research by the Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest found OIP issued 46 legal opinions over the past three years and took two years or more to process all but three of those inquiries. Those kinds of delays have prompted complaints from the public and the media, which rely on public records for reporting purposes.

Stirling Morita, a longtime Honolulu journalist and president of the Hawaii chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, warned in his testimony that “in journalism, all some bureaucrat has to do to discourage publication of an article is delay the release of records. The longer the wait, the less newsworthy the subject matter may become.”

Taniguchi (D, Makiki-­Tantalus-Manoa) said OIP is attempting to develop a “culture” where people have a better sense of how to handle requests for records, and has been spending more of its resources on that effort.

Apart from issuing formal opinions, OIP also attempts to work with agencies to facilitate the release of records when appropriate, and “a lot of their concern is that departments are not clear about what they should be doing, and so they tend to not want to release stuff.”

As for the time required by OIP to issue legal opinions, “I wasn’t quite convinced that it’s a really big problem. It’s a problem maybe because media people need access to documents, and so we have a lot of that (and) we also got testimony from citizens, too, but I couldn’t evaluate whether … a six-month (deadline) would be any better,” he said.

Brian Black, executive director of the Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest, said “it’s extremely unfortunate and kind of shocking” that the bill died.

When OIP was first created, the process of resolving disputes was supposed to be quick, informal and free, but it now takes years, Black said. Citizens who ask OIP whether they can access government records can’t get answers in a timely fashion, he said.

Cheryl Kakazu Park, director of OIP, opposes establishing a six-month deadline for dealing with public inquiries unless lawmakers provide more funding, staff and training. She said that “historically, OIP has been very severely underfunded.”

She said OIP has set a goal of resolving all formal cases within one year of filing, and said many requests to OIP are handled without formal opinions. She testified the agency received 1,234 “requests for services” in 2017, and 93 percent of those were resolved last year. She said 77 percent of those requests were resolved “approxi­mately the same day.”

A total of 278 “formal cases” were filed with the agency last year, and 83 percent were resolved the same year, she said.