passopenrecords.org

Douglas Hill, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, has recently responded to the open records issue with a comment on this blog and a letter in the Harrisburg Patriot-News. Earlier in the year, Mr. Hill and Tim Williams, president of the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, exchanged letters over PNA’s “Open-Records Challenge,” and in June Mr. Hill testified, on behalf of townships, municipal authorities, cities and boroughs as well as his organization, on Senate Bill 1.

All of which makes him one of the more engaged voices in the current debate – which is something we welcome. In fact, I wish that I could do more than link to the letters and articles in this posting because the true purpose of this blog is to be a forum for the exchange of ideas and information.

There are a number of areas in which we agree with Mr. Hill. For example, he cites the confusion caused by “the disparate policies among counties, and in fact there are disparate policies within counties since each row office is independently elected, and has relative independence in developing records retention and search capabilities.” Consequently, he wrote, reiterating his Senate testimony in June: “We’d support mechanisms to help create better uniformity and are working with the statewide Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts in this respect.” We believe such uniformity is an essential ingredient in any new legislation because, as our Challenge has made clear, the current state of affairs is often as onerous on the records provider as it is on the records requester.

Second, Mr. Hill has made an eloquent plea for the need to balance openness and privacy: “Our only issue is to assure the proper balance between the public’s right to know and, in our era of individual concern, the need to appropriately secure private information of individuals whose records we maintain.”

We agree, and made the same argument in an one of our earliest postings on this site: “The dichotomy between transparency and privacy is a false one. We are not talking about paparazzi chasing after celebrities. We are not talking about photographers climbing trees to peer into bedrooms. We are not talking about invading people’s private zones. We are talking about opening the public domain to public scrutiny. It is no coincidence that one of the first things totalitarian governments do is close down the independent press and to break down the protective wall of private rights.

“There are things that should not be made available to the public at large. Some, such as social security numbers and medical records, are indisputably private. Others, such as home addresses, are the subject of an important public conversation.

“We want to talk about where and how to draw the line between public and private. What do you think?

“But let’s be clear: The issue here is about transparency – and the opposite of transparency is not privacy.

“It’s secrecy.”

We do not agree, however, with the distinction Mr. Hill drew in his letter to the Patriot-News, between “urging” citizens to seek open records and “tying up taxpayers’ employees with records requests as the entry ticket to the contest sponsored by PNA.” This is a distinction without a difference. We wanted people to request open records – which, by the way, is something they have every right to do. We did not seek to make life difficult for local agencies – because we believe that such records should be readily accessible. And as far as we can see, there was little disruption to agencies as a result of the Challenge.

As the Patriot-News wrote on Oct. 2:

“There is, of course, absolutely no evidence that this effort to highlight the shortcomings in what is generally considered the weakest open-records law in the country has resulted in any amount of difficulty whatsoever at any level of government.

“And even if you did have people lining up somewhere as part of the PNA initiative, wouldn’t that be a wonderful expression of interest by people in their government, something that is in short supply?

“The ‘caretakers of the community,’ we thought, would have gone out of their way to embrace increased public interest in government, not attempt to stifle it.”

We appreciate the willingness of Douglas Hill to join so vigorously in the conversation on open records. We think such open exchanges are not simply the reason this blog exists . . . they are also the foundation of democracy.

There are many areas where we agree with Mr. Hill . . . and there will undoubtedly be points of disagreement, particularly when we start discussing the exceptions.

We all want new open records law that gives clear guidance to public agencies and overdue access to public citizens . . . and that is clearly something that we don’t have now.