02/27/2008 6:35 PM ET

ANNAPOLIS, Md. - A bill seeking to deny the release of public records if the request is related to pending civil litigation came under stiff questioning Wednesday by lawmakers and critics who see it as a threat to the state's public information law.

The bill, which is sponsored by Baltimore City lawmakers, is designed to protect municipalities which are being sued, Delegate Curt Anderson, D-Baltimore, testified.

The problem, Anderson and supporters said, is that attorneys suing local governments use the open records law to seek large volumes of documents to circumvent discovery rules during a legal proceeding _ at great expense to municipalities.

"Basically, what they do is they inundate the municipality with duplicitous requests," said David Ralph, chief of litigation for Baltimore City, who added that the measure has "nothing to do with the limitation of information,  public information."

But the bill has drawn criticism from Attorney General Doug Gansler, who recommended that the bill be shot down because it would "create a new mandatory exception of extraordinary breadth." Gansler wrote that the bill is "troublesome for a number of reasons."

"For example, because some agencies are continuously involved in litigation, this provision could apply to vast quantities of records and effectively reverse (the law's) policy of access to records to one of non-access," Gansler wrote.

Ralph said the bill has been amended to make it less broad and to put the burden on municipalities to prove why a public information request would not be legitimate.

"The onus is on us to articulate those reasons to the court," Ralph said.

But that didn't satisfy critics, who said they had not seen the amendments and that even an amended bill would encroach badly on public's right to access.

Former attorney general Stephen Sachs testified that the "phantom amendments" would only turn the legislation "from a catastrophe to a disaster" by gutting the purpose of the Maryland Public Information Act. He also said the law already has provisions to address abuses.

"One, the original bill was extraordinarily broad and outrageous," Sachs said in an interview after the hearing. "Two, the phantom amendments, which no one has seen, apparently, are unnecessary ... because such a remedy already exits," Sachs said.

The bill also drew concerns from Delegate Joanne Benson, D-Prince George's, who said she was worried about how it would affect a law firm's ability to help foster children.

"What they're saying is that it would make it very difficult for them to have access to the information that's necessary to make these children's lives whole," Benson said. "I've got a little problem with that, if that, in fact, is true."

But Ralph insisted amendments to the proposal would not have an impact on legitimate public information requests, only "abusive, duplicitous" requests.

"This will not impact any MPIA request that currently is a legitimate MPIA request," Ralph said.

Gansler, in his letter, wrote that "a less sweeping revision of the PIA would likely remedy whatever problems this bill is meant to address."