passopenrecords.org

Considering that we are in the depths of the summer doldrums, the amount of news coverage and the strength of editorial comment on open records reform has been staggering.

First the sheer volume of it all. August is supposed to be a slow month in the news business. Beyond that, the legislators have all gone home, so there won’t be any action until after Labor Day on the three right-to-know bills pending in the House and Senate. Just as striking has been the tone of the editorials – they are anything but perfunctory efforts to fill an editor’s white space with recycled press releases from the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association. Instead, they have been strong and often-exasperated demands for significant change.

Some critics will shrug the whole thing off as evidence that open records is a “newspaper issue” and the editorials are just the special pleading of a special interest group. But the number of editorials – many of which address local issues as well as the need for statewide change – mean that this issue has caught the public’s attention . . . and that more and more voters believe transparency in government – at all levels – is the first step in the march to real reform.

Some may say that this is an issue the media is keeping alive to sell papers . . . just as my friends in the legislature said two years ago when papers around the state would not let the pay raise fiasco die a quiet death. They stopped saying that when 50 incumbents did not come back to Harrisburg after the last election. Like the pay raise, this is an issue that tells us a lot about the quality of our government, and the result is that it has traction.

Finally, what is striking about these editorials is the combination of hope and skepticism that infuses them. The words that our state legislators are using give us all reason to believe that they understand the importance of this issue and that they are committed to real reform. But words are not deeds, and despite all the words, little real reform has come out of the legislature to date.

We have been down this road too often in Pennsylvania, and we have watched the nice words that come out of politicians’ mouths end up on the committee room floor . . . which is, of course, the best reason there is for real transparency.

We need to take our legislators seriously enough to hold them accountable for the words they speak. When they tell us in June that open records is the top item on their agenda, we need to make sure they remember in September. Our goal should be, not to dismiss their good intentions as hypocritical, but to make sure they live up to their promises.