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The head of a board that oversees state public records says its recent move to cut back on requirements for keeping some records was not significant enough to warrant notifying people about it in advance.

Matthew Blessing, chairman of the state Public Records Board, said Monday that the board's August vote about maintaining records deemed to have only temporary value was simply aimed at clarifying existing policies for handling so-called transitory records.

"I thus do not believe that the minor clarifying language ... was substantive enough to warrant inclusion in the August 24 agenda," Blessing said in an email.

His comments came in response to a complaint filed Monday by an open government watchdog group contending that the obscure board violated Wisconsin's open meetings law and as a result improperly approved changes that Gov. Scott Walker's administration then cited in saying it didn't have certain text messages sought in a public records request.

The Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council filed a verified complaint Monday with the Dane County district attorney against the state Public Records Board, alleging violations of the open meetings law.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported last week that the board may have violated the state's open meetings law at its August meeting. Questions also have been raised about whether the board overstepped its authority with the changes it made to records retention policies.

Bill Lueders, the council's president, contends in the complaint that the board failed to provide adequate notice of the meeting's subject matter in the agenda, then failed to record the actions taken, such as motions and roll call votes, in the meeting's minutes.

"The changes included modifying the definition of 'transitory records,' which are records deemed of such temporary usefulness they need not be retained for any specified period," Lueders wrote to Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne. "Since the Public Records Board's action, records custodians have already cited the change as the basis explaining why records responsive to certain Open Records requests are not available."

One day after the Public Records Board's Aug. 24 vote, Walker's administration responded to a records request from the Wisconsin State Journal for some text messages by saying it had no such transitory messages.

The texts the newspaper sought were linked to a $500,000 loan by the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. to Building Committee Inc., which was promoted by top administration appointees. WEDC officials later worked to get federal tax dollars to help the struggling Milwaukee-based company, even though the loan to BCI went sour within months and the owner of the firm, a Walker donor named William Minahan, had provided false information to the state.

The Journal Sentinel has filed a records request for texts related to Building Committee Inc., but it's unclear whether those records have already been deleted.

The August action by the Public Records Board could limit the access of citizens and media outlets to information from texts, emails, Facebook messages and other electronic methods that public employees might use to communicate about official actions.

The new definition expands on the description of transitory records to include "emails to schedule or confirm meetings or events, committee agendas and minutes received by members on a distribution list, interim files, tracking and control files, recordings used for training purposes and ad hoc reports for individual use."

The board's change also means that transitory documents are "no longer limited to correspondence records only."

Blessing said Monday that the new definition approved in August was aimed at improving a definition adopted five years ago, adding that in August 2010 it was "imprecisely described" as "correspondence and other related records of short-term interest."

But critics called the move a significant one.

"I am deeply concerned that a little-known board made significant changes to our public records laws without public input," said Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha). "There is no doubt that Gov. Walker and Republicans continue to degrade clean, open and transparent government and make Wisconsin open for corruption."

He echoed calls for Ozanne to investigate whether the board had violated the state's open meetings law.

Walker on Friday said there may be changes to how the Public Records Board operates in the future.

"My understanding is that, in light of the attention, they're looking to the Justice Department for further counsel on how they should proceed going forward, and if there's modifications that need to be made, I think they'll certainly look at doing that," he said in Waukesha.

Speaking to reporters in Madison later that day, Walker added that he hadn't talked to Administration Department officials about why certain texts that were requested were not available.

"I don't have an explanation. I haven't talked about that," Walker said. "The bottom line is I expect everyone in the administration to follow the open records law now and in the future."

The recent battle over open records in Wisconsin is just the latest fight to erupt around the country over public access to government officials' texts and other electronic messages.

And as officials increasingly use electronic communications such as texts, fights over whether those records should be released to the public often have ended up in the courts, which overwhelmingly have ruled texts and other electronic exchanges are public records.

Detroit tried for years to keep secret text messages that former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick exchanged with his chief of staff. The records were released in 2008 to the Detroit Free Press, and the texts showed that in a police whistle-blower trial the two officials had lied under oath about having an affair.

In August, the Washington Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a public employee's work-related text messages sent and received on a private cellphone are public records.

And Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval was sued last week after seeking to keep secret any text messages sent between him and executives of the electric utility NV Energy regarding legislation affecting that industry.