The state agency tasked with deciding whether government records ought to be released to the public has issued 46 legal opinions over the past three years and took two years or more to process all but three of those inquiries, according to a watchdog group that promotes transparency in government.

Senate Government Operations Committee Chairwoman Donna Mercado Kim said that if those statistics are accurate, the time lag by the state Office of Information Practices is “not acceptable.”

Kim’s committee advanced Senate Bill 3092 on Thursday to require the OIP 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.

“We want to express the concerns that we would like them to be more timely,” Kim said after the hearing. However, Kim said she believes the office would need to add staff to more quickly process inquiries and complaints from the public, and that would cost money.

R. Brian Black, executive director of the Civil Beat Law Center for the Public Interest, told lawmakers that citizens are asking the OIP if they can access government records dealing with issues ranging from pesticides to prison policies, but they can’t get answers in a timely fashion.

“OIP was set up to handle appeals when there was a denial of public access,” Black said. “It was intended to be expeditious, informal and at no cost to the public. Two years is not expeditious, and that’s the problem that the public is dealing with now.”

He added, “We need to recognize how severe this problem is and how it’s impacting every single civic dialogue that’s occurring in the state.”

Stirling Morita, a longtime Honolulu journalist and president of the Hawaii chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, said media outlets “have not had this kind of slowdown in decisions on records requests since 20 years ago.”

“In journalism, all some bureaucrat has to do to discourage publication of an article is delay the release of records,” Morita said in written testimony. “The longer the wait, the less newsworthy the subject matter may become.”

The measure also was supported by Common Cause Hawaii and Transform Hawaii Government, a coalition focused on improving government services.

Cheryl Kakazu Park, director of OIP, said the agency opposes the proposed six-month deadline for dealing with public inquiries unless lawmakers provide more funding, staff and training. She said OIP has already set a goal of resolving all formal cases within one year of filing.

OIP 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.

Park acknowledged the agency still has cases from 2015 that are unresolved, but said that is because “historically OIP has been very severely underfunded.” The agency has only about half of the 15 positions it had at its peak, and after adjusting for inflation it has a budget that is just 42 percent of what it was 24 years ago, she said.

She also said OIP has been writing more careful opinions in recent years, “and it’s paid off.”

The only OIP opinion that faced a court challenge in recent years involved a lawsuit by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and the court rejected a request for summary judgment that would have overruled the OIP in that case, she said.

“If we didn’t have the respect of the courts and our opinions didn’t have any clout, we wouldn’t be able to get agencies to just voluntarily go along with us a lot of times,” Park said. She said many complaints from the public are resolved informally by OIP staff lawyers and don’t require written opinions.

SB 3092 now goes to the Senate Judiciary Committee for further consideration.