Pennsylvania Right to Know Law

The BCCT is beginning a series on the new Pennsylvania Right to Know Law.

Who are the Morrisville contacts?

For the borough: George Mount, borough manager
For the school district: Paul DeAngelo, business administrator

Considering the secrecy that the Emperor and the board of chosen accomplices has employed over the past year of amazing cosmic power, I'm expecting Mr. DeAngelo's waiting room to be a bit too small to accommodate the number of people wanting answers.

The school district has a link right on the home page. I did not see one on the borough webpage.

New law makes secrecy more difficult
Seeking records used to mean proving why they should be released; now the government must prove why they shouldn’t.
By PETER JACKSON

HARRISBURG — PennDOT’s list of dangerous roads and intersections is an official secret, shielded from the public because of loopholes in the state’s Right-to-Know Law.

In 2006, a Commonwealth Court panel upheld PennDOT’s refusal to turn over a partial list to a Pittsburgh television station. The court said the station had failed to prove the information was sufficiently connected to an account, contract, voucher or decision — categories in the law that define what is a public record.

“The situation is a Catch-22 for requesters, in that the agencies and courts hold them to an impossible standard — prove there is a connection, but you cannot have the records that will enable you to do so,” said Gayle Sproul, a media lawyer who represented Hearst-Argyle Television Stations, WTAE’s owner, in the case.

Public-access advocates hope that widely shared frustration will subside after Jan. 1, when an overhaul of the state’s Right-to-Know Law takes effect. The changes are expected to dramatically expand what people can find out about what goes on behind the scenes of the state and local governments.

The new Right-to-Know Law will repeal the 52-year-old original, long regarded as one of the nation’s weakest.

No longer will you, journalists or activists interested in mining government records have to cross their fingers and hope the document they want fits into one of a half-dozen narrow categories. Nor will they have to hire a lawyer and go to court to challenge an agency’s refusal to turn over a record.

The new law is built on the presumption that most government records are open — the opposite presumption of the current law. It also places on public agencies — from state bureaucracies to county governments and local school districts — the legal burden of showing why a record should be withheld, instead of forcing requesters to establish why it should be made public.

“This is really a change in the culture of governance in Pennsylvania,” said Barry Kauffman, director of Pennsylvania Common Cause. “In too many cases, employees and officials of government agencies had an attitude that they own the government records instead of just being the caretakers of the government records.”

In most case, those whose requests are denied will be able to appeal directly to a new, nonjudicial agency — the Office of Open Records — whose director has a track record as an advocate of public access.

Teri Henning, general counsel for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, which spearheaded lobbying for the new law, said the hope “is that, over time, these fundamental changes will create a culture of openness in Pennsylvania government.”

That spirit of openness is tempered in the law by a list of 30 wide-ranging exceptions that are tailored to respond to such concerns as personal privacy, public safety and internal deliberations by public officials.

The exceptions, which make up about one-fifth of the law, are “very wordy, very detailed and dense, filled with what I will call, kindly, mumbo jumbo,” said Sproul, who’s also president of the Pennsylvania Freedom of Information Coalition. “That in itself is an impediment to getting public records.”

The law also expands access to government contracts: Private businesses that do business with state and local governments are required to make some records available to the public. It covers all of state government, including — to a limited extent — the Legislature and the state’s judicial system, both previously exempt.

It covers an array of state affiliated entities including community colleges, the 14 state owned universities in the State System of Higher Education and the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association. The state related universities — Penn State, Pittsburgh, Temple and Lincoln — are generally exempt, but required to issue annual financial reports that include their highest 25 employee salaries.

Local agencies covered by the law include counties, boroughs, townships and school districts, as well as charter schools, vocational schools and intermediate units.

By now, every agency should have designated an open-records officer to oversee compliance, adopted a policy for managing its records and briefed employees on how to handle records requests.

No one is predicting a flawless implementation.

“There’s going to be confusion at the beginning ... from citizens, from public officials and from members of the media,” said Terry Mutchler, the lawyer and former reporter that Gov. Ed Rendell appointed to a six-year term as director of the openrecords office.

Many observers predict a spike in records requests — and appeals to Mutchler’s office — in early 2009 as Pennsylvanians test their access under the new law. That will likely be followed by a gradual return to a more normal pace.

“After five years, we’ll forget it was ever such a big deal,” said Emily Leader, a lawyer for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, which speaks for the state’s 501 school districts.

Mutchler, who’s hiring six staff lawyers to help her handle the expected deluge of appeals, has been working with associations representing county commissioners, township supervisors and school boards — as well as newspapers. At some sessions, concerns were expressed about the status of e-mails.

The new law defines a record as “information, regardless of physical form or characteristics, that documents a transaction or activity of an agency.” That includes not only e-mails, but audio recordings, photos and even films.

“Here’s the e-mail training,” Mutchler told a Pennsylvania School Boards Association workshop in October. “If you don’t want to read it on Page One, don’t put it in e-mail. If you’re sending an e-mail, envision it on letterhead.”

Access advocates hope the new law will open records like PennDOT’s hazardous-sites list to public scrutiny.

PennDOT spokesman Rich Kirkpatrick said the lists are kept confidential because the rankings can be misleading and state law bars such information from being used in legal claims against the state.

Asked if PennDOT plans to withhold the information after the new law takes effect, he said, “I can’t speculate.”