By Paige Winfield Cunningham

RICHMOND – Delegate Bob Marshall needs to severely revamp two bills he’s introduced in reaction to the University of Virginia withholding controversial climate change research, members of a House subcommittee told him Thursday.

The Manassas Republican wants public employees to be fired if they willfully withhold documents that are subject to disclosure via the Freedom of Information Act. His target: UVA employees who withheld climate change documents from him last year.

But the bill Marshall offered before the FOIA/procurement subcommittee of the House general laws committee contains language he didn’t intend. It allows a judge to terminate the employment of a public employee if they’ve been found guilty of violating FOIA.

When questioned by subcommittee members, Marshall, who does not possess a law degree, offered a disclaimer. He’d simply asked for staff to create a bill that contained punishment for violating FOIA, he said.

“I just asked … to draw me up a statute where there was something punitive there,” Marshall said.

Subcommittee chairman Salvatore Iaquinto said Marshall needs to go back to work on the bill.

“I think this has a serious flaw in it because I don’t think anyone here on this panel wants to give the court power to fire somebody,” he said.

Marshall’s using the bill to push back against the university after a tussle over climate change research.

Last spring, he sent a FOIA request to UVA asking for documents produced by former professor Michael Mann, whose research was part of some controversial climate change findings. The university at first said it no longer had access to the documents.

But after Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli subpoenaed the research, UVA reversed the story and told Marshall the documents will cost $8,300 to produce.

Marshall says they shouldn’t cost that much — which is why he also wants to require all public documents be labeled at time of creation to indicate whether they’re subject to FOIA laws. Pre-labeling everything will make it easier and cheaper for public agencies to respond to requests, he said.

Marshall’s second FOIA-related bill incited a flurry of opposition.

A labeling requirement would be incredibly expensive for state and local governments, said Phyllis Errico, general counsel for the Virginia Association of Counties.

“It’s going to have to be every public employee that’s going to have to be trained and know what is FOIA-able and is exempt,” Errico said. “That cost would be astronomical.”

Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, said the bill could cause fewer documents to be available to the public if they were mistakenly marked as exempt during the initial labeling.

Or, it could create extra work for employees at risk of being held accountable for mislabeled documents, said Ginger Stanley, executive director of the Virginia Press Association.

“Our concern would be a very chilling effect on opening records,” Stanley said. “When a request is made, that custodian would have to go through those exempt records because it would be on their backs whether this was truly an exempt record or not.”

Iaquinto said that some public documents contain both types of information, complicating matters.

The committee voted unanimously to send the bill to the state’s FOIA Advisory Council for revision. Its death would signal a blow to public accountability at UVA, Marshall said.

“They’re not following the spirit of Mr. Jefferson’s founding of that university,” he said.