On June 3, 2016, Governor Charlie Baker signed into law the first update to Massachusetts’s public records law since 1973.  The law seeks to make government entities more accountable, accessible, and efficient in their management of requests for information and mandates that each state agency delegate at least one employee to be a “records access officer.” The bill also imposes a shorter timeframe to respond to record requests. Agencies have a 10-day window to produce the requested documents or to respond and if they refuse or are unable to produce a record within 10 days they must notify the requestor and if an agency agrees to provide records outside the 10  day window it only has 15 days to do so.

When this Bill was…