Change the law
Apr 30th, 2007 by JamieB
The goal of passopenrecords.com is exactly what the name implies . . . to get the Pennsylvania legislature to pass – and the governor to sign – a law that gives people meaningful access to public records.
Now is the right time: people are demanding reform in state government, and the legislators and governor seem to be listening.
But now means now . . . not later. There is evidence that public attention is waning, and that politicians will wait them out. Let’s face it, rewriting the open records law probably doesn’t make many people’s top 10 list of things to do this week. Even as he was announcing his plan to introduce legislation, Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R-Delaware) said this wasn’t an issue his constituents were too worked up over.
But as the Deborah Musselman of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association pointed out, “It sounds like a philosophical issue until something goes wrong in your community.”
And don’t think of it as a parochial issue that only matters to a few special interest groups in Pennsylvania. Recently, we have seen cases that range from a utility worker named David Drozd’s efforts to buy a house in rural Westmoreland County to Kevin Tillman’s testimony about seeking the truth of his brother Pat’s death in Afghanistan. The issue? Secrecy and lack of access to public records. Saying the military sought “to deceive the family but more importantly the American public,” Kevin Tillman spoke of being “actively thwarted by powers that are more interested in protecting a narrative than getting at the truth and seeing justice is served.”
Keeping public records out of the public domain is wrong, but it happens at all levels of government.
“Down in Fayette County, it’s tough to get records from any municipality,” said Rep. Tim Mahoney, who has introduced a bill to change that. “You’ve got to jump through hoops, go to offices and jump through more hoops to get anything. They make it hard because they think you’ll go away.”
Please join this conversation. Tell us your stories. Tell us your thoughts. Tell us what changes you’d like to see.
We’re not going away until the law in Pennsylvania is changed.
Depending on your time frame and the resources at your disposal, one way to get to know people who have been stonewalled in their attempts to gain access to public records is to FOIA some agencies for the FOIAs they’ve received in the last year or so–that’s assuming that the name of the requestor isn’t redacted.
Sen Pileggi introduced Open Records legislation without the presumption that government record is a public record even though those records are paid for by the public to track expenditures of public money for public purposes and are kept for the benefit of the public, not the government. If this is the government of the people, by the people and for the people, then the people have to have access to records of government spending and other activities.
This is not expensive and government agencies can be proactive by putting income and expense on the net. Listing no bid contracts with payees. Posting the check register of all payments with categories so we can tell how money is spent. Follow the money and a citizen will learn a lot about government operation.
bob
I am also surprised that Sen Pileggi says that this is not a priority with his constituents. I think that Young Republicans of Chester County are on board and there is no one that thinks it is a bad idea for citizens to have access to government records.
In response to the comment by Leslie Graves, I agree that it would be a useful exercise to try to track the various agencies’ handling of right to know requests. In our experience at the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, however, many agencies take the position that these records are not “public records” because they are not “accounts, vouchers or contracts” or “minutes, orders or decisions” of the agencies (which is how our current law defines what is public). Along the same lines, however, we have started to gather information on how much agencies are spending in denying access to records, including legal fees they have incurred.