in Houston, Texas

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His work at the Capitol, trying to win passage of bills that would open more records and defeat those that would close them, takes up a majority of his time these days as the legislative session begins a sprint to the finish line. In the past few weeks, Elkins has testified multiple times before the state Senate Committee on State Affairs, including speaking in opposition to bills that would close off public access to state employees' dates of birth and home addresses.

(Photo at left: Elkins is getting out the word about FOI via Twitter.)
Senate Bill 375 would have allowed TxDOT to withhold all information it collected on traffic crash reports. The compromise worked out with the agency, Elkins said, would allow the public to continue to get information about the wreck itself -- where it happened, when it happened, why it happened -- but not identifying information about the people involved in it.

"We agree that certain information should not be released, and other information should," Elkins said. "Not in an aggregate statistical form, but in raw form. And that anybody that wants to run their own numbers should be allow to do that and perform their own independent analysis. That committee substitute has been voted out of the Senate committee and is now on the way to the Senate."

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Elkins estimated he spends about 60-65 percent of his time either at the Capitol or tracking bills. The day he and I talked, he had spent the morning testifying against a bill that would automatically expunge some criminal records. "We don’t think that’s good public policy," Elkins said. (House Bill 293 is still in committee.)

One of the biggest victories this session for the cause of FOI include a state reporter shield law -- the Free Flow of Information Act, which has passed the state House and has passed out of committee in the Senate.

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