More from around the state
Oct 27th, 2007 by JamieB
• State Rep. Tim Mahoney (D-Fayette), sponsor of a bill to increase public access to government records, still wants the legislation passed after the House State Government committee modified it considerably.
House Bill 443 would change Pennsylvania law to presume all government records are public and that only narrow exceptions should be made. Some members of the House State Government Committee and nonprofit groups have said they will oppose the bill because they believe those exceptions have been lamentably widened.
“We’re changing what it actually means halfway through the process,” Russ Diamond, chair of PA Clean Sweep, told The Bulletin. “I think [legislators] have slid onto some kind of different railroad spur that leads to nowhere.”
Mr. Mahoney, however, does not want the changed legislation to fail nor be sent back to committee.
“We need a starting point and this is a starting point,” he said. “There are going to be some things changed back, I’m sure.”
Rep. Mike Vereb (R-Montgomery) said committee Democrats should not have voted to report the bill to the full house without further deliberation on the changes.
“I’m going to oppose the bill,” Mr. Vereb said. “This is a train being operated here and we’re being run over. Why are we rushing into this?”
What are Pennsylvania lawmakers and other state, county and local officials afraid of?
Why is it that they want to continue to deny Pennsylvania residents access to public documents that is routine in other states?
Late Wednesday, the House State Government Committee, with one Republican joining all of the Democrats in voting for it, approved a top-to-bottom rewriting of a measure that had been sent to committee members earlier this week, along with a dozen or so more modest amendments.
The bill does have some improvements over the current law.
But this is Pennsylvania where every step toward more open government is followed by two steps back into secrecy.
To start with, the Legislature went easy on itself. As the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association has pointed out, lawmakers have gone to such lengths in trying to keep their own contacts with the public secret that the draft bill foreclosed access to many records that are available under the existing law.
It also is not retroactive.
What are state lawmakers afraid of? What don’t they want you to know about their words and deeds? Their fear of public disclosure provides only one answer: A lot.
• Pennsylvania’s Legislature is off the charts in a number of categories. It’s the biggest full-time legislature except for Congress. It has more full-time staff members than any other state legislature. Its members are among the most lavishly compensated. Now, it has achieved another milestone: most cynical legislature.
After a volatile two-year election cycle in which Pennsylvanians revolted at the polls against the Legislature’s self-indulgent excesses, state lawmakers have been promising a wealth of reforms. Last week, the state House Government Committee betrayed those promises by converting a sound bill to open public records into a device for providing citizens with even less access to public records.
Perhaps the surest sign that state politicians are paying lip service to reform was the manner in which the amendments were adopted by the committee. The amendments were not made available until a few hours before the committee meeting. No public hearings were conducted on the changes. Further amendments were added during the meeting itself, providing no one with an opportunity to review them. And, after a laborious, yearlong process during which open-records advocates worked with lawmakers to produce a meaningful law, the committee railroaded the changes into the bill in a single day. Over the course of that same year, House leaders have made much of rules changes that they claimed are designed to produce openness. The committee, however, suspended the rules in furtherance of its anti-reform amendments.
This nefarious conduct by the committee poses a challenge for rank-and-file lawmakers who claim to be interested in reform. Either they will correct the committee’s retreat from reform, or invite the same sort of political firestorm that followed the equally ill-considered and secretly concocted pay raise bill in 2005.