News roundup
Aug 2nd, 2007 by dani_k
It’s been a while since we’ve posted news stories from around the state, and they just keep piling up!
The Scranton Times-Tribune reports on a Lackawanna County Prison inmate, Shakira Staten, who recently gave birth in her cell. The Times-Tribune has been requesting prison records pertaining to the event, and denied access because of “security measures.” According to the paper, “The denial of the records request is somewhat surprising because the newspaper was granted access to the same kind of reports” when reporting on a 2003 investigation at the prison. Ms. Staten had signed a waiver of her privacy for the medical records.
The Pittsburgh Tribune Review’s Brad Bumstead said in his July 29 column that the reform movement is dead. But the Centre Daily Times editors believe differently - in their view, the reform movement is “inching along.”
On that same day, the AP’s Marc Levy reports that “the Legislature is exempt from Pennsylvania’s open-records law, which is designed to ensure public access to information at all levels of government. That exemption could disappear if pending proposals to expand the law to include the Legislature are approved.”
The Carlisle Sentinel editorialized about the secrecy of “walking-around-money,” or WAMs, on July 30 - followed by a Pottstown Mercury editorial on the lack of information about WAMs the next day.
In local open government news, eagle-eyed blog reader veblen pointed us to this Valley Independent story from Washington Township, outside of Pittsburgh, where “some residents were outraged upon learning that the results of an investigation into employee payroll records would not be made public.”
At the other end of the state, Bucks County Commissioner candidates say that their county is doing a “poor job disclosing basic financial information.” They asked for Bucks County’s 2007 budget, and paid $40 to receive a 400-page printout which they say is hard to decipher.