passopenrecords.org

As the legislature heads into its holiday break, Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R-Chester) has promised that his Senate Bill 1, as amended by the House last week, will be the first item on the upper house’s agenda when it reconvenes in the middle of January.

Here are some thoughts about the legislation as it now stands and the process by which it got there from newspapers and bloggers in Pennsylvania:

• Perhaps the Beaver County Times most succinctly captures the broad skepticism that many still have toward this legislature and the issue of reform: When it comes to the Legislature adopting a meaningful open records law for Pennsylvania, it pays to approach the matter with the soft bigotry of low expectations.

• While The Reading Eagle goes further than many in asking the legislature to toss what they have done and go back to the drawing board, it does zero in on some serious flaws that remain in the bills:

The Issue: The state Senate passes an open-records bill, and a House committee sends its version to the House floor.

Our Opinion: Both bills are seriously flawed. They should be jettisoned and lawmakers should start over.

Pennsylvania lawmakers seem to be trying to give the impression they are creating a much better open-records law than they really are.

Both bills contain lengthy lists of exceptions under which government officials can withhold documents from the public.

[M]any of the exceptions are vaguely written, which would allow for broad interpretations and could be used to hide information that should be available to the public.

• Although it concludes that “[s]tep by step, lawmakers are moving open records reform in the right direction,” The Morning Call of Allentown hones in on an exemption that legislators that will not willingly give up: (28) (III): ”Identifying a person that requests assistance or constituent services from a member of the General Assembly.”

Let’s remember, the newspaper rightly points out, that lawmakers are public officials conducting the public’s business. That’s what constituent services are. There are other exemptions that protect sensitive personal or legal matters individuals might take to their elected representatives, so a provision such as this opens the door to mischief. It potentially could shield lawmakers from disclosing what lobbyists are meeting with them for some ”assistance.”

• And finally, Veblen, in a post to this blog, questions the House’s strange decision to delay implementation of the law until 2009: Did this version of the bill eliminate the odious provision which protected records created prior to the bills implementation?

If it did, then the delay in the implementation of the bill could be read as a loophole which could give agencies time to destroy records before the law made them public. For that reason, I would like to see a clause in the bill which makes the destruction of records, which would ordinarily not be destroyed, a crime.