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The 114th General Assembly in 2025 created more exemptions to the Open Meetings Act than I’ve seen in any single year of tracking since 2014.

TCOG’s 2025 legislative report on bills affecting public records and open meetings describes 18 bills passed by the General Assembly and signed into law and four of significance that failed.

While the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government celebrated progress in applying the agenda requirement for meetings to more governing bodies, the piling up of governing bodies that got new laws allowing them to deliberate in private is a disturbing development.

Also disappointing, the Legislature rejected efforts of a set of Republican lawmakers who wanted to expand the new public comment law. They were trying to help citizens who had complained that, because of loopholes, they were not being allowed to give public comment at public meetings. One of the bills passed the House but failed in the Senate.

On the public records front, we continue to see the Gov. Bill Lee administration pushing and getting broad and discretionary exemption bills. This year, the administration pushed a new law that allows a new immigration enforcement division to keep records it receives confidential under the idea that at least some of the records it receives could be sensitive. On the positive, the Lee administration worked with TCOG to incorporate improvements to the electronic meeting statute for state boards.

After two recent school shootings in Nashville, lawmakers also sought bills to study school shooters in more detail. One bill, prompted by the Antioch High School shooting, opens up juvenile delinquency records of a shooter that is deceased. The other, presumably related to the transgender shooter at Covenant School, requires studying medical and drug records of deceased school shooters, keeping individual information confidential but requiring data reported to lawmakers annually.

Finally, we saw more maneuvering around public notices and legal notices required to be published in newspapers. It looks to be a bumpy ride as at least one of the changes will require government entities to find additional news and information websites to post their online notice and no longer simply rely on newspaper websites where they were getting the online posting at no additional cost.

We hope our annual report gives you insight and details on what the Legislature did this year. You can peruse previous annual reports on our website’s Reports and Research page at tcog.info/tcog-reports-and-research.

Deborah Fisher is the Executive Director of Tennessee Coalition for Open Government.