passopenrecords.org

Reform is dead, the public’s anger over the pay raise is a thing of the past, and it’s back to business as usual in Harrisburg.

At least, that’s what I keep hearing is the lesson of last week’s election.

I would not be so quick to read that lesson into the off-off-year elections, and you certainly wouldn’t know it from this sampling of reactions to the current version of House Bill 443:

• Weakening the open-records law hardly seemed possible when the process began. But House Democratic leaders are trying to snatch retreat from the jaws of victory. They took a good proposal by Rep. Tim Mahoney (D., Fayette) and watered it down with a fire hose last week in committee.

How did a reasonable bill turn bad so fast? Word is that House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese (D., Greene), anxious about an attorney general’s investigation into legislative bonuses he doled out, wanted to quickly serve up a bill that he could tout as “reform.”

The hasty committee action wasn’t pretty, even for a sausage factory. The House State Government Committee had members voting on amendments they’d barely had time to read. The legislation was completely rewritten in about 48 hours.

Did we mention that legislators were dancing this jig in the name of open records and transparency?

• Pennsylvania’s Legislature apparently is bent on efficiency. It won’t even wait for a reform bill to become law before rendering it meaningless; it plans to render the reform meaningless during the legislative process itself.

The House has gutted what began as a good bill to truly open Pennsylvania’s public records to easy public access.

The list of problems with the bill is long, from the exclusion of existing records in order to protect current politicians from scrutiny, to the delay of its implementation until after the next legislative election, to the explicit preservation of court rulings that close public records under a law that would be defunct.

All of those provisions speak to the hubris of lawmakers, but another provision even tops those for sheer arrogance. The gutted bill would exempt all government e-mail from public disclosure.

The issue in public disclosure isn’t the ability of citizens to obtain pieces of paper from the government. It is their ability to obtain information. That information is public property whether it’s stored on paper or in a digital format.

• Only the sausage grinders in the Pennsylvania House could make mincemeat out of legislation intended to bolster one of the lamest open-records laws in the nation.

The bill’s much-touted “flip of presumption” – that all government records are public unless specifically exempted – has been rendered meaningless by House “reformers.” In short order they managed to stuff the legislation plum full of loopholes.

This is the reform that House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese, D-Waynesburg, is so anxious to serve up? If this is meant to be a diversion, such banality won’t deflect the heat from a state attorney general’s investigation into whether legislative leaders paid bountiful bonuses for staffers’ campaign work.

A Senate bill offers fewer exceptions than the House version but it’s wobbly on the appeals process. A conference committee conceivably could cobble together the strengths of both bills and give the public something meaningful.

We are tempted to say better that than for Pennsylvania’s lawmakers to pay lip service to transparency and replace a 50-year-old bad law with one that’s even worse. But transparency is transparency. And open records are open records.

• House ruins open-records legislation

The Pennsylvania House of Representatives made a mess of what once looked like a good opportunity to reform the state’s open-records laws. We’d certainly like to know why.

Somehow, House members seemed to get lost in a debate about which records should be open to the public. In the end, it passed more than 50 amendments to describe what should be considered an open record. That sucked the life right out of the bill.

It’s so fouled it up, in fact, that Pennsylvanians would no longer have access to:

* government and legislative e-mail;

* correspondence between legislators and constituents;

* correspondence between legislators and other state agencies;

* emergency dispatch records, such as 911 calls;

* internal performance audits.

Those are available to you now but would be rendered secret if the House bill became law.

• The Commonwealth already has one of the weakest laws in the nation, and this measure actually would make it worse.

As such the House should reject this measure and return to the legislation as it was introduced and before it was weakened by a series of amendments.