The bill would allow draft legislation and communications between lawmakers, their constituents and legislative staff to be withheld from release to the public.

The bill would still have to go through a conference committee and be signed by Gov. Dave Freudenthal before becoming law. Freudenthal is prohibited by law from publicly threatening a veto but has voiced opposition to the bill.

"It extends the law to create a privileged class among public servants, and I'm not sure that's appropriate," he said Friday by e-mail. Dan Neal, executive director of the Equality State Policy Center, said the bill could enable a lawmaker to "operate in a very secretive way."

Along with passing the bill, the House rejected a proposal Tuesday for the Joint Judiciary Committee to study the open-records issue over the interim.

Rep. Wayne Reese, D-Cheyenne, said he agreed that lawmakers needed some degree of confidentiality while working on legislation but didn't know at what point information should become public.

"If the public's perception is that we're trying to hide something, then we've lost the confidence of the people we're trying to represent," Reese said.

But two members of the Joint Judiciary Committee -- Rep. Tom Lubnau, R-Gillette, and Rep. Monte Olsen, R-Daniel -- spoke against the amendment. Lubnau said having the full House decide interim topics would supersede the usual process of committees prioritizing interim topics.

He mentioned several other topics -- such as sex crimes, courthouse security and access to legal aid programs -- that the committee planned to look at over the interim.

Neal and Marguerite Herman, of Wyoming's League of Women Voters, had sent letters to legislators asking them to take up the issue during the interim.

"We're disappointed," Neal said after the House passed the bill. "We thought this would be a great chance for the Legislature to set up some hearings around the state so people could understand how the whole process works. I felt there was a little bit of a stampede to action and they didn't need to do that."

The Wyoming Press Association has also lobbied against the bill. Jim Angell, the association's executive director, said he didn't buy the argument by some legislators that they needed confidentially to draft and develop legislation.

"Public input always makes a good bill better and sometimes makes a bad bill go away," Angell said. "We're talking about the very root of democracy, public involvement in the early legislative process."

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