passopenrecords.org

• State Rep. Thomas R. Caltagirone said Thursday that he would not support an open-records bill expected to go before the House for a vote next week, even though he is listed as a co-sponsor.

The version approved by the House State Government Committee late Wednesday is so weakened by amendments that it takes away his intent of making nearly all state records available to the public, said Caltagirone, a Reading Democrat.

“This is all public money and public documents,” he said. “Why should we be hiding anything? This is going to keep the door halfway closed. We’re going back to square one.”

• . . . it was no real surprise last week to have Democrats in the state House State Government Committee vote to exclude a heap of legislative records, among others, from public view under a new Right-to-Know Law.

Hey, when you’re rewriting the law, if you can change it your favor, why not? What’s more important: the public’s right to know or your ability to act without oversight?

A cynical old journalist might look at this curve ball out of left field and think that it is simply business as usual in the Pennsylvania General Assembly. Legislators are famous for taking a bill that seeks to reform something they don’t want to reform and amending it, either to negate the effect of the reform or to make the bill so unpalatable that even the sponsor will vote against it. (This has been done more times than we can count.)

A CYNIC MIGHT ALSO point out that the committee’s majority Democrats all voted to keep more records secret, at a time when their own caucus’ private papers are being examined by a grand jury that was empaneled to determine if taxpayers’ money was used illegally to reward House staffers for working on political campaigns.

• Pennsylvania newspapers are condemning the Legislature’s efforts to come up with an open records law. Pennsylvania has had the worst open records law in the country for years and the effort to remedy the problem has turned into another monumental screw-up by the most expensive, least effective state legislature in the country.

Regardless of their political leanings, liberal, moderate or conservative, Pennsylvania newspapers have criticized the Legislature on their editorial pages in recent days.

• Pennsylvania has one of the worst open records laws in the country. Improving it should be easy. You would think.

Wrong.

A blogger on www.passopenrecords.org wrote that politicians had promised real reform. The lip service was greeted by hope tempered by doubt. Similar pledges have been made before without leading to real change.

This week Pennsylvania politicians danced the familiar steps. Pledge reform, then shut the door. It is business as usual in Harrisburg.

• The continuing insult

Unbelievable. The House State Government Committee has approved a revised open-records law that turns the clock back on the cause of openness. After several months of rewriting Pennsylvania’s embarrassingly hostile approach to public records, the committee, chaired by state Rep. Babette Josephs (D-Philadelphia) passed a half-baked bill late Wednesday that deserves to be killed, lest it become law.

Yet this bill is a case of “death by amendment,” and it reveals the discomfort, if not outright disdain, that many legislators experience at the idea of working and communicating in full view of the public. . . .

The bill was sent out of committee over the protests of several Republican members who said they didn’t have a chance to evaluate the add-ons and that the final version was never aired in a public hearing. . . .

This isn’t progress. The entire House, along with the Senate and Gov. Ed Rendell – all of whom said they heard the message of voter dissatisfaction in recent years – should declare this bill DOA and insist on one that brings Pennsylvania into modern times. Shining a 15-watt bulb onto the closed quarters of state government is an insult to every Pennsylvanian.

• The biggest step backward last week occurred when a House committee rewrote a much-touted bill to provide citizens more and easier access to government records at the state, county and municipal levels. Two days after the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association and other groups voiced optimism that a sound open records bill would be forthcoming, the House State Government Committee turned that optimism on its head.

• House committee does skulduggery in gutting open-records proposal

As promised, the state House of Representatives took action on a new open-records law last week, with a hearing Wednesday in front of the State Government Committee. With all due respect, the members should have stayed home.

Both the committee’s process and the content of the bill are outrageous. Committee Chair Babette Josephs, D-Philadelphia, pushed through amendment after amendment, most of which the members were seeing for the first time. Their cumulative effect was to exempt broad categories of state records from being open. When members of the committee pleaded with Rep. Josephs to slow down by either holding more hearings or not reporting the bill to the floor for a quick vote, she refused. Alarmingly, at one point she even said she could not do so because the Democratic leadership (Majority Leader H. William DeWeese, D-Waynesburg) didn’t want to. So much for caucus leaders sharing power. One other point about the committee chair: She had the nerve to address a pro-open records rally on Tuesday as a reform leader … and then led the way as the committee rammed through this travesty.

• The devil is always in the details, and changes to the bill before it was approved showed that legislators still don’t have the stomach to allow anything approaching full public access to their work.

[Rep. Kerry] Benninghoff (R-Bellefonte) expressed frustration that as many as 16 amendments were pushed through “at the speed of light” without a public hearing in what previously had been a collaborative process. He said the Republicans’ opposition was not partisan and asked, “What is the rush?”

• For the legislature to even consider making electronic communications – now the most common way of communication – off limits lays bare the true character and motives of the legislators involved.

• Pennsylvania would have one of nation’s most restrictive laws on access to public officials’ e-mail messages under an open records bill that the state House of Representatives plans to consider this week.

The legislation would ban public access to all e-mail messages sent or received from all public officials whether it’s the governor or a township supervisor.

Under current state law, the public can view Pennsylvania state and municipal officials’ e-mail if the content meets the state’s narrow definition of a public record. And the Legislature is not subject to the state’s open records law, making all of its e-mail off-limits.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Arlington, Va., said most states — either through court orders or the lack of explicit bans on releasing e-mail messages — treat e-mail the same as any other record kept by public officials.