passopenrecords.org

When he announced his support for open records reform earlier this year, Gov. Rendell said that his office had had to turn down more than half of the 5,000 right-to-know requests it had received since 2003.

This is an extraordinary statement. Has anyone followed up?

By its own count, the governor’s office declined more than 2,500 requests in four years. If I’m doing the math right, that works out to 625 denials per year . . . or 52 a month . . . or 12 a week. That is to say, the Rendell administration turned down, on average, almost two requests every day, seven days a week for four years. Now that is a lot of denied requests.

To my knowledge, nobody at the press conference asked the governor about all these requests and denials. It would be interesting to know what it is that people are asking for that is so difficult to give them? Why did the governor’s office have to turn them down? What happened next? If anyone does know the answers to these questions, please let us know. Better yet, if you made one of the 2,500+ requests that were denied, let us know what happened and why and where things stand now. I am assuming there must be hundreds, if not thousands of you out there . . . unless a very few people made an awful lot of requests.

Happenings elsewhere
In a really interesting article, “Frosty” Landon, the executive director and founder of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, as well as president of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, wrote that Virginia has made some significant progress in opening state government – thanks at least in part to the strong support of the General Assembly. One of the changes that Commonwealth has made is one that we are determined to get in Pennsylvania: “For the first time,” Landon wrote, “the burden [in Virginia] was placed squarely on government to prove to a court’s satisfaction that it had the legal right to close a disputed meeting or withhold data.”

To date, we have not been able to get our state legislature to “flip the presumption” and put the burden of proof on the government, rather than on the citizen requester.

Why is it important to do that? First and foremost, because the records belong to the public – so they should be available for public inspection unless there is a valid reason to withhold them.

“Transparency is a good thing,” noted Don Gilliland, managing editor of the Potter-Leader Enterprise and a member of the Pennsylvania Freedom of Information Coalition.

But you wouldn’t know that from reading the modern history of Pennsylvania’s state government. “If there’s any way people in Harrisburg can keep something from the public,” said Gilliland, “unfortunately, they do. The knee-jerk reaction is to keep everything secret.”

A lot of people are now trying to change that, and one of the leaders in that effort is Gilliland’s group. The Pennsylvania Freedom of Information Coalition, which was founded in 2005 by journalists, librarians, attorneys, educators and community group leaders from all parts of the Commonwealth, is dedicated to protecting the right of all citizens to obtain public information from local and state government officials.