passopenrecords.org

By a combined vote of 239-1, the Pennsylvania legislature has approved Senate Bill 1, which will significantly change the state’s open-records law. But, while the House voted unanimously yesterday on third and final passage of SB1, its members made 19 changes to the bill they received from the upper house, and the Senate will not reconvene to consider those changes until the middle of January.

Both versions of the bill “flip the presumption” – records of the executive branch and local governments are presumed to be public, unless they are on a list of specific exceptions. The burden to prove that a record is not public will now be on the government agency, not the private citizen. That represents a sea change from the past, and it is the single most important component of the bills.

Both bills would also open up the financial records of the legislature and judiciary, and include PHEAA and the four “state-related” universities within their scope. Among the last, of course, is Penn State, which engaged for years in a high-profile battle to keep Joe Paterno’s salary secret, until it the state Supreme Court ordered it to open that record last month.

Among the changes enacted in the House by a vote of 191-0 are: delaying full implementation of the law until 2009; putting the mediator of access disputes in the State Ethics Commission rather than the Department of Community and Economic Development, and banning agencies from charging for research, redaction and copying time. The House alterations also provide greater access to legislative records, but prevent disclosure of birth dates and phone numbers in public records.

The Senate, whose majority leader, Dominic Pileggi (R-Chester) is the primary sponsor of SB1, will debate the changes when it returns to Harrisburg on January 14.

So, the good news is, we have virtually unanimous support for a major overhaul of the state’s archaic open-records laws. The lone dissenter was beleaguered Senator Vince Fumo (D-Philadelphia), who said SB1 did not go far enough

The bad news, of course, is that in the “year of reform” in the state capital, we didn’t get reform. As Terry Madonna, pollster and political science professor at Franklin and Marshall College, told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “There is something seriously awry with the legislative process in Pennsylvania when, within a year, you cannot get a consensus on measures that are important to the electorate. It shows that there is a glacial pace for reform in a legislature that is badly in need of reform.”

His words were echoed by a member of the legislature.

“I’m frustrated,” said Rep. David Steil (R-Bucks). “These aren’t partisan issues. “They aren’t about Republican or Democrat. They are about responsive government.”

A lot of other people are frustrated as well. But this combined vote represents real progress, however slow, on the fundamental issue of reform. It is not done yet, and there are certainly imperfections in the pending legislation, but to combine cliches from the 1950s and 1960s, “wait till next year . . . there is light at the end of the tunnel.” Let’s hope so.

• Note on telephone numbers. I ordered a new telephone yesterday. I was told that I got a free listing in the directory. If I chose not to be listed, I would have to pay $2.75 a month. I don’t know – it just seemed ironic that happened on the day the legislature voted to make phone numbers secret.