Proposed changes to the District’s Freedom of Information Act will not be one of the issues the D.C. Council considers during its first round of budget debates Tuesday.

WAMU first reported Council Chairman Phil Mendelson’s plan to change the District’s open records law in early May.

The FOIA proposal was tucked into a 160-page budget plan published by the Council this month.

The measure limited what people could request to information relating to “official acts of public officials and employees” and called for requestors to “describe with particularity” the information they wanted.

And Mendelson has decided not to move forward to a number of proposed (and controversial) changes to D.C.’s open-records law. I broke the story on those changes and the possible impact last week: https://t.co/UTohVoFWPH

— Martin Austermuhle (@maustermuhle) May 14, 2019

Supporters of the bill said the changes would curtail overly broad requests and cut time and costs associated with responding to each request.

Mendelson’s move to restrict access to public records, however, has received backlash from critics concerned about government transparency.

This story originally appeared at WAMU.

Previously:
Transparency Advocates Sound Alarm About Proposed Changes To D.C.’s Open Records Law