passopenrecords.org

According to the Carlisle Sentinel, House Leadership “took the wounded bill [HB 443] and put it out of its misery,” and we have a new bill in its place in the House: HB 2072. The House comes back on Dec. 3, the Sentinel notes, and says that the break is “time citizens should use to let their representatives know they expect to find something nice under the Christmas tree this year — an open records law for Pennsylvania that can stand up to the best in the nation.”

Here’s an AP story about an effort to allow citizens to recoup attorney’s fees in open records cases.

The Republican & Herald editorialized that there’s a “culture of secrecy” in Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review says that “shadows of greed darken the state capital.” The Morning Call hopes that the scandals in Harrisburg aren’t “toxic to the spirit of reform.”

While we were stuffing ourselves with turkey, a few stories popped up that illustrate the need for open records reform:
-The Bucks County Courier Times reported on a $25k/month consultant who hasn’t left any kind of paper trail - no contract, no work product, nada - to show for his fees.

-The Johnstown Tribune-Democrat reports that hikers who called 911 EIGHT times to say they were being shot at weren’t really taken seriously by police. The tapes - where one caller says, “Bullets are whizzing over our head…Oh God, a lot of bullets.” -were released to the paper “on condition that the tapes would not be recorded and that individual names would not be used. Officials earlier had refused to allow a reporter to listen to the 911 tapes, saying they were part of an internal personnel investigation.”

-The Morning Call reports that the Copylay-Whitehall Sewer Authority has “instituted a policy by which employees can be fired for releasing information.” The Sewer Authority’s spending, particularly for travel, has been under scrutiny since April, when the paper fred a right-to-know-request for receipts and statement from authority credit cards.