Topeka ? Last month, a jury convicted the adoptive father of 9-year-old Brian Edgar of murdering the boy, a week after his adoptive mother pleaded guilty to the same crime.

This month, a legislative committee is considering dozens of Kansas laws like the one that seals records of how the state and agencies it hires handled the boy’s placement in his adoptive Overland Park home.

“I think the public has a great interest in saying, ‘How could that be avoided?”‘ said Sen. David Adkins, R-Leawood, who unsuccessfully pushed to have the records opened during this year’s legislative session.

Various government records are closed under 370 provisions of Kansas law, including 46 in the Kansas Open Records Act itself. But another law approved in 2000 requires each exception to the open records law to be reviewed after five years, with any exception eliminated without legislative action to keep it intact.

The Special Committee on Local Government is scheduled to meet Friday to hear testimony about open records, to start the job of determining which exceptions survive beyond July 1, 2005.

And the panel’s chairman says the job will require the attention of several legislative committees.

“We shouldn’t just, carte blanche, rubber stamp something and let it slide through,” Rep. Jene Vickrey, R-Louisburg, told The Wichita Eagle.

The rationale for some closed records appears obvious for privacy reasons: family financial information on student loan applications, medical or psychiatric treatment.

For others, the reasons are less obvious. Public agency records related to proposed legislation are closed, unless the records already have been mentioned in an open meeting.

And some are just curious: People can’t get a single list of a public utility’s customers, but can get them, one at a time, by requesting specific names.

“The sheer volume of it is daunting and suggests that maybe we’ve got more records closed than we’ve got open,” said Mike Merriam, a Topeka lawyer who represents news organizations and others in open-records cases.

For now, representatives of local and state government agencies are waiting to see what direction the committee takes.

The bulk of the records closed under state law protect the private information of individuals and companies, said Don Moler, executive director of the League of Kansas Municipalities.

“It just so happens that government is the keeper of that information,” he said.