All public employees in Wisconsin must retain records, per the state’s open records law. Except one group. The ones who wrote that law.

State legislators have exempted themselves from the retention portion of the law. Some want to change that.

“The public should not have to worry about legislators having secret conversations or deleting emails,” said state Rep. Clinton Anderson, D-Beloit, who is introducing a bill that would close this loophole despite the fact that the state Assembly adjourned last month for the rest of the year.

Anderson released the bill Monday, March 15, because it was the start of Sunshine Week, a nonpartisan collaboration among groups in the journalism, civic, education, government and private sectors that shines a light on the importance of public records and open government.

People in suits sit at desks with microphones in a room while a person holds paper at a podium in the foreground. — Rep. Clinton Anderson, D-Beloit, left, and Rep. Kalan Haywood, D-Milwaukee, right, listen as the Wisconsin Assembly convenes during a floor session, Jan. 14, 2025, at the State Capitol in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)

In Wisconsin, state legislators must comply with a records request, but if they have destroyed the record, they have nothing to send.

“Obviously, it’s troubling,” said Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council. “It allows legislators to make things go away that they would rather not see the light of day.”

State Rep. Rob Brooks, R-Saukville, told the Wisconsin Examiner in 2021 that his office “frequently deletes emails during the normal course of business each day.”

And he’s not the only one.

“My office does not delete records on principle, and we should make sure every elected official is held to that same standard,” Anderson said.

In 2025, Gov. Tony Evers stepped in to close this loophole – his 2025 budget proposal included a measure to “remove the Legislature’s exemption from open records law by requiring that records and correspondence of any member of the Legislature be included in a definition of a public record to provide greater transparency for the people of Wisconsin.”

The proposal also would have allocated funds and opened a full-time position with the Legislative Technology Services Bureau to carry out this new requirement. But the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee removed it from the final budget.

State Sen. Chris Larson, a Democrat from Milwaukee, has introduced bills to close that exemption for state legislators multiple times and is doing so again in the Senate this week in tandem with Anderson.

A person in a suit with a patterned tie and a multicolored ribbon on the lapel stands with a water bottle nearby. — Wisconsin state Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, is photographed during a state Senate session on June 7, 2023, in the Wisconsin State Capitol building in Madison, Wis. (Drake White-Bergey / Wisconsin Watch)

Before his election to the state Senate in 2010, Larson served on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors. As a public official, he had to maintain all his records there and assumed the same when he arrived in the Legislature.

But as his email inbox filled up and ran low on space, Larson said he was told by IT staff to simply delete old messages.

“People often wonder why so many wildly popular policies go session after session without a vote or even a public hearing, while special interest slop rises to the top of the agenda,” said Justin Bielinski, Larson’s spokesman. “The Wisconsin Legislature’s exemption from record retention requirements creates a perverse incentive to do the people’s business in secret. If lawmakers aren’t going to be responsive to their constituents’ needs, the least we can do is allow people to find out who they are listening to, and whose voices they choose to ignore.”

Larson’s bills to close the loophole have been ignored by Republicans who control the Legislature, he said. The majority party generally pays little attention to bills from the minority.

But the fact the Wisconsin Legislature is even subject to the open records law, albeit with a caveat, makes it one of the more transparent states. Nearly a quarter of all states — 12 in total — do not even allow records from the Legislature to be accessed by the public, according to a study from The Journal of Civic Information. Congress has also excluded itself from open records requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

The exemption for legislators here “completely undermines Wisconsin’s public records law and the ability for citizens to trust their Legislature,” said David Cuillier, director of the University of Florida’s Brechner Freedom of Information Project. “It’s really quite bizarre and an outlier in the United States. The right thing to do is remove it and restore accountability and credibility to the institution.”

The Badger Project is an independent, reader-supported newsroom in Wisconsin.

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Originally published by Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Peter CameronArticles

A loophole lets Wisconsin lawmakers delete public records