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Overland Park — City officials plan to ask the Kansas Legislature to amend the state's sunshine laws so that local governments' meetings and documents about homeland security are shielded from public access.

But some advocacy groups question the need for creating a special terrorism exception in the state's laws on open meetings and open records.

Overland Park officials are refining a draft of a proposal to permit the closing of records for "matters relating to preparing or preventing and responding to any act of terror or threatened act of terror." It's not yet clear just what kind of records would be covered or how "terror" would be defined.

Police Chief John Douglass said he wanted the law to protect reports compiled at the Police Department about the security risk of events held in the city. He also said it was needed to limit access to security plans.

Douglass and other city officials said making public documents that detail tactics and procedures for dealing with terrorism would put security at risk.

Officials also plan to ask the Legislature to write an exemption to the state's open meetings law that would specifically allow public agencies to meet privately to discuss homeland security.

The city thinks the open meetings law --which already has 46 exceptions -- authorizes public agencies to meet privately to discuss some security issues, but not all matters related to homeland security.

A freedom-of-information advocacy group warns that governments could use such a law to restrict access to information under the guise of fighting terrorism.

"We're beginning to see the ‘terror' word used in a very broad sense to anything that would threaten a community," said Rebecca Daugherty, director of the Freedom of Information Service Center at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

For instance, she said, a prosecutor in South Carolina claimed the sale of methamphetamine was a terrorist action because it would be so disruptive to the community.

"What we're talking about is protecting the public," said Lori Knadle, an assistant Overland Park city manager. "There is some information that needs to be kept confidential so that we're not releasing it to the bad guys."

Kansas is among several states that have tightened access to documents and public meetings since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Such protected material typically deals with public water systems, emergency response procedures, vulnerability assessments and details of security arrangements.

Daugherty said many of the laws were designed to close information that would reveal a government's vulnerability to terrorism.

"The problem there is that if the public can't see what these vulnerabilities are, they can't demand that they be erased," she said.