passopenrecords.org

Four reasons why we need a new open records law:

1. They’re our records. It seems redundant to point out that the public owns the public records – and yet the people who enacted Pennsylvania’s original “Right to Know Law” in 1957 and those who amended it in 2002 didn’t seem to think so. In fact, the presumption is that looking at these records is a privilege not a right. The Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, for example, refused to open its records to public view for over a year and a half. Its officials and attorneys fought all the way to the state supreme court to keep the information private. When the public saw the hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenses the board had racked up, they understood why.

2. This is a public issue. All too often the people who now control access to public documents try to paint this as something that only the media cares about – as if this is some kind of game in which public servants try to keep important stuff away from snooping reporters. But reporters don’t have any more – or less – right to see public records than anyone else, and it’s worth remembering that the reason the press wants the information is not to keep it secret, but to make it public.

3. The legislature’s records are public records. Of all the loopy aspects of this issue, this is perhaps the strangest. The current open records law does not cover the records of Pennsylvania’s representatives and senators – the people we elect to do the public business on our behalf. This led to a bizarre set of events earlier this year over a request for information on bonuses paid to legislative staff members. Acting State Treasurer Anthony Wagner, who would emerge as a hero in all this by the time the smoke cleared, agreed that the Right-to-Know law applies to the Treasury Department because it is an executive agency. The legislature, however, is not. “Therefore,” Wagner wrote, “we find the RTK to be entirely ambiguous on the central question of whether records regarding payments Treasury has made on behalf of the legislature are public records required to be disclosed.” Now that’s a loophole. . . . But the fact is, Wagner was right. The law is ambiguous on that central question, and it should not be. The treasurer, by the way, subsequently overruled his own staff and said the records were public documents – although he apparently had to negotiate with legislative leaders to get them to agree.

4. Show us the money. Why does it so often come down to money? Probably because that’s what people are so often trying to hide. It’s the PHEAA’s over-the-top expense accounts . . . it’s the legislative staffers’ year-end bonuses . . . it’s the huge benefits packages retiring legislators have been taking with them. What was it that Emerson said? “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” Better to keep our money – like our spoons – out in the open where we can all count it.

Please feel free to add to the list.