A key state lawmaker says he plans to push legislation this session addressing weaknesses in the state’s Public Records Law — and there appear to be plenty of them.

Rep. Antonio Cabral of New Bedford, the House chairman of the Legislature’s Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight, says he is drafting a bill that would revamp the Public Records Law. He declined to get into details, saying the bill will be released sometime in January.

“We don’t know exactly what the end product will be,” Cabral says. “But I’ve been wanting for some time to put together something on public records law and lobbyist reporting.”

Now would seem to be a good time. The law isn’t working well (see “Four Months to Get Utility Bill”), and the state officials in charge of enforcing it appear to be at odds.

The cover story of CommonWealth’s fall issue, “Paper Tiger,” reported that huge swaths of state government, including the Legislature, the governor, and the judiciary, are exempt or claim exemptions from the law. The story also said the law is flouted by officials at all levels of state government. Of 44 public records requests filed in connection with the story, only two officials responded in full accordance with the law. Six officials didn’t respond at all, and virtually all the others failed to comply with one or more of the law’s requirements.

Many of the problems raised in the article are continuing. Friction between Secretary of State William Galvin’s office, which handles appeals of public records requests, and Attorney General Martha Coakley’s office, which enforces the Public Records Law, is mounting. The two officials have been feuding about how the Public Records Law should be interpreted.

Alan Cote, Galvin’s supervisor of public records, says the secretary of state has decided not to turn over any more records cases to Coakley because of past instances where she undermined his authority by refusing to enforce or reversing his rulings. Cote’s decision means that whenever he rules in favor of a citizen seeking records from an official and the official refuses to turn them over, the citizen’s only recourse is to engage in a costly court battle.

Shirley Kressel also renewed her efforts — first detailed in “Paper Tiger” — to obtain documents related to the demolition of the Gaiety Theater on Washington Street. She had filed a public records request for the documents in 2005, but says Boston Mayor Thomas Menino never responded. She appealed to Cote but, in Catch-22 fashion, he decided he couldn’t do anything because there was no response from the mayor to review. The mayor’s spokesperson told CommonWealth she couldn’t confirm or deny ever receiving Kressel’s request.

Kressel refiled her Gaiety Theater request in November, this time in person. She received a handful of emails, most of them ones she herself had written to city officials about the project. Convinced the city is withholding documents, she is filing another appeal with Cote. Her suspicions about the city may be warranted. One email she recovered was from Randi Lathrop at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, who told a colleague never to email Kressel. “Basically ignore her,” Lathrop wrote.