The Alabama Senate on Thursday passed a bill that would require state and local government agencies to respond to public records requests by certain times.

Alabama law already says people have a right to read and get copies of public records, but does not require government agencies to respond to records requests by any certain times. That has been cited as a major weakness in the law because agencies can effectively deny a request by ignoring it or delaying the response.

“Right now under current law, it’s the wild west,” said Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, sponsor of SB270.

Orr’s bill would require agencies to acknowledge requests within 10 business days and sets timeframes for additional responses. It allows agencies to extend the deadlines by notifying the requester.

The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 29-0 after a short discussion. It moves to the House of Representatives.

Orr has tried in previous years to strengthen the public records law but the bills have not passed. Orr said there was widespread agreement among the agencies that would be affected on the latest version of the bill.

The bill approved Thursday was a different version of one that was approved by a Senate committee last week. The earlier version of the bill spelled out circumstances under which the person requesting the records could file a lawsuit if their request is denied. That is not part of the version of the bill that passed the Senate on Thursday.

The bill categorizes records requests in two main ways.

Standard requests are those for which a government agency could provide the requested records in less than eight hours of staff time. Agencies would have to acknowledge standard requests within 10 days and provide a substantive response with 15 days after that.

A substantive response would be providing the record, designating a specific time to provide it, agreeing to provide it contingent on payment of a fee to cover reasonable costs, or denying the request with an explanation of why.

Agencies could extend the time for a substantive response in increments of 15 business with a written notice to the requester.

A standard request would be presumed denied if there is no response in 30 business days. The bill does not spell out a specific recourse to a requester whose request is denied.

The second category of requests, time-intensive requests, are those that would take more than eight hours of staff time to process. Agencies would have to acknowledge the requests within 10 days and notify the requester within 15 days later that the request was considered time-intensive.

The bill says an agency would have to provide a substantive response to a time-intensive request within 45 business days, either fulfilling it or denying it, and could extend that in 45-day increments.

The bill says a time-intensive request is presumed to be denied if there is no substantive response or if the records are not produced within 180 business days.

The bill says agencies do not have to respond to requests that are vague, ambiguous, overly broad, or unreasonable in scope. It says agencies do not have to respond to requests that seek records that are not public or records that do not exist.

A 2019 study by a researcher at the University of Arizona ranked Alabama last among states in responsiveness to requests for records.