Editorial voice from elsewhere
Say you’re curious about how your municipality has been spending taxpayer money and submit a request for the information under the state’s Right-to-Know Law.
They deny it and after your initial free appeal to the state’s Office of Open Records, you wind up in court.
Your lawyer successfully argues your case, and a judge grants you access to the documents. It’s a great day, right? As the proverbial little guy, you fought and won.
Then you get the response. The municipality doesn’t have – and says they never had – the documents you requested.
Time and money down the drain.
That’s not how the state’s open records law is supposed to work, but that seems to be how various state agencies believe that it should.
In a recent court filing, attorneys for the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors, Pennsylvania School Boards Association and Pennsylvania Municipal Authorities Association said asking an open records officer to determine if records exist before he or she denies access to them is too much of a burden.
Instead, they think it would be better to leave it up to the person who made the request to determine if they think an appeal is worthwhile.
It puts anyone who’s denied a request at a fundamentally unfair disadvantage. They’ve got to weigh navigating (and potentially pay for) a legal fight, all without knowing whether that agency has the requested information.
That’s ridiculous, and not how the RTK Law is supposed to work.
A brief stating the organization’s position was filed in support of the state Department of Corrections, which is fighting against paying nearly $120,000 in legal fees to the Herald-Standard. The fees were a portion of those incurred during a three-year fight to get information about inmate illnesses from the DOC.
A Commonwealth Court judge found the DOC acted in bad faith when it failed to turn over responsive records at multiple junctures in the case, and that it didn’t conduct a search for those records until after the newspaper brought the case to court.
When the judge issued his award for legal fees, the DOC asked the state Supreme Court to review his findings.
The state agencies – CCAP, PSATS, PSBA, PMAA – joined the DOC’s fight, filing a brief supporting the agency’s position.
Should the court side with the DOC and those agencies, it will have a chilling effect on open records requests across the state.
CCAP represents all 67 counties.
PSATS represents over 1,400 second-class townships.
PSBA represents 500 school districts and 29 Intermediate Units.
PMAA represents over 700 municipal authorities.
They collectively represent about 2,700 agencies across Pennsylvania, and their attorneys want our state Supreme Court to rule that, when you ask for records, they don’t have to determine whether they have them if they intend to deny your request.
They want our Supreme Court to say it’s up to you to roll the dice on an appeal. That should leave you as incensed as we are, because this isn’t just about our fight to get records, nor is it about our owners recouping their legal fees.
This is really about you – the average Jane or Joe who doesn’t have a company with deeper pockets behind them.
It’s about making sure that if you chose to take that fight for those public records to court, you don’t find in the end that you’ve fought for nothing.