TCOG’s 2025 Legislative Report

TCOG released today its 2025 Legislative Report that examines 18 new laws related to the Tennessee Open Meetings and Public Records acts. You can view all past annual legislative reports on our Legislative Reports and Research page.

For the record, 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.

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.

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 some of the records it receives could be sensitive. On the other hand, the Lee administration worked with TCOG to incorporate improvements to the electronic meeting statute for state boards.

Read the full report.

-Deborah Fisher, Executive Director of Tennessee Coalition for Open Government