Right to Know, Part II

Part 2 of the BCCT Right to Know law series.

Director vows to err on side of openness
By PETER JACKSON

HARRISBURG — In high school, Terry Mutchler’s tenacity could be measured in broken field-hockey sticks, including the time she broke her wooden stick in the heat of a game and had to use one belonging to her coach.

“She broke that one,” too, recalled her mother, Star Mutchler. But she broke it scoring the winning goal for her team.

Mutchler will need all the toughness she can muster as she leads the implementation of Pennsylvania’s new Right-to-Know Law, which takes effect Jan. 1.

“She’s a go-getter and she speaks what she thinks is right,” Star Mutchler, 78, said of her 42-year-old daughter during a telephone interview from her Stroudsburg home. Already, Mutchler has dis- played a willingness to break ranks with her boss, Gov. Ed Rendell, on politically hot issues.

For example, she advocated the disclosure of confidential lists of legislators picked by party leaders to share hundreds of millions of dollars a year for pet projects in their districts. She also called for barring public agencies from charging extra for the labor involved in redacting nonpublic information from public records.

On both sides of the open records debate, Mutchler has impressed people with her energy, work ethic and grasp of the legal complexities that confront her fledgling Office of Open Records.

“She sees both what the agencies’ concerns and issues are [and] she knows what the reporters [want],” said Elam Herr, director of the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors, which speaks for 1,455 townships.

Craig Staudenmaier, a Harrisburg lawyer who specializes in media law, called Mutchler “fair-minded but steadfast, in that what’s public is public and what’s not is not.”

Passionate, intense and no nonsense, Mutchler has firm ideas about her new job. She tells people in government and in the news media that her office will evenly enforce the law but makes clear she will err on the side of openness and won’t tolerate attempts to end-run the new requirements.

“I genuinely believe that this government does not belong to the government. It belongs to citizens,” she said in an interview earlier this month. “And it irks me when a citizen comes to the very thing it owns and is denied access to it. There’s just something fundamentally wrong about that.

“Somewhere along the line, we have forgotten the servant in public servant,” she said.

A Monroe County native, Mutchler is the youngest of seven children. Her father, a retired Army sergeant who was a World War II veteran, died several years ago.

She harbored a childhood dream of becoming a lawyer. But after working as a reporter for her high school paper and then at The Daily Collegian at Penn State University, she wound up with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

She worked at The Morning Call in Allentown for a couple of years, then was hired by The Associated Press at its Capitol bureau in Harrisburg. She worked for the news cooperative for six years, including stints at bureaus in Atlantic City, Illinois and Alaska.

In Springfield, shortly after she took over the Illinois statehouse bureau in 1993, Mutchler’s professional and personal lives intersected in a way that changed her career path. Mutchler fell in love with a state senator, the late Penny Severns, the Democratic whip who would be nominated for lieutenant governor in 1994.

Increasingly troubled over the ethical conflict created by the relationship, Mutchler transferred to AP Alaska shortly before the election, which the Democrats lost. In 1995, she left the AP and returned to Springfield to work as Severns’ spokeswoman and speechwriter until she died of breast cancer in 1998.

Mutchler earned her law degree in 1999 at Chicago’s John Marshall Law School. She was a litigation attorney in Chicago when she was lured back to Springfield in 2003 for a job in the attorney general’s office helping settle open-records disputes.

Mutchler and her partner, Maria Papacostaki, a professor and poet, rent a home in Delaware County while Mutchler continues trying to sell her home in Springfield. She receives a $120,000 salary and a state-owned car.
Question

Q: What is the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records?
A: It is a new agency in the executive branch of state government, part of the Department of Community and Economic Development. The agency’s first director is Terry Mutchler, a reporter-turned-lawyer who previously worked in a similar position under the Illinois attorney general. The 10-person staff will include six lawyers besides Mutchler.

Generally speaking, the office will decide appeals by people whose Right-to-Know Law requests have been rejected by state executive agencies or by county and local agencies. It also will provide training for those agencies and issue advisory opinions interpreting the law.