passopenrecords.org

Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome back to www.passopenrecords.org, a blog devoted to open records reform and government transparency in Pennsylvania.

The legislature is scheduled to reconvene Monday, January 14, and Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R-Chester) has said that open records reform is his top issue, that he will make his own Senate Bill 1 that body’s first priority, and that he hopes to have a bill on the governor’s desk by the end of this month.

We came a long way in 2007: a long way from a legislature that had for years operated behind one of the worst open-records laws in the nation – and that was consequently renowned for its late-night, closed-door dealings; a long way from the proposition that open records reform was an issue only the press cared about to public pronouncements that government transparency was the foundation of representative democracy.

Yes, we came along way . . . and yet we still are not there – not in Pennsylvania and not in the nation.

Does this Dec. 31st report from National Public Radio’s All Things Considered ring any bells?

“NASA on Monday dumped 29,000 lines of raw data onto the Internet to fulfill a promise to release information about the safety of air travel. NASA declined to say what the data meant, but previously, the space agency had refused to release the information at all because it feared scaring the public and hurting the aviation industry.”

Think back to last August, in the wake of the fatal collapse of the I-35W bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.

Several months earlier the Beaver County Times had requested information on the safety Pennsylvania’s bridges from the Department of Transportation. PennDOT told the newspaper that such information was not public. People might not understand what the bridge rankings meant and the information could scare them.

After initially stonewalling a request to testify before the House State Government Committee, Transportation Secretary Allen Biehler made a surprise appearance and announced he had reversed his department decision . . . but not before justifying it on the grounds that release of such information might cause the public “undue concern.”

Not unlike what happened in Washington:

“The Associated Press first asked for the data under a Freedom of Information Act request, but NASA’s response about scaring the public was so startling, Administrator Michael Griffin was called before Congress to explain. At that hearing on Halloween, Griffin acknowledged that NASA’s rationale for holding back the data was wrong, and he promised to release the data by the end of the year.”

Griffin, like Biehler, posted what The New York Times called “an intentionally scrambled, partly deleted version of the safety data it gathered from 24,000 interviews with airline pilots, making good on a promise to Congress to make public information that it said earlier this year would shake public confidence in the airlines and threaten their commercial interest.

“But the agency released the data from the $11.5 million program in a format that made it difficult if not impossible for outsiders to analyze in search of trends.

“’This is now 3 years old, and it’s been dumped, unanalyzed and scrubbed of much of the useful information,’ said Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC).”

Moreover, reported NPR, “Griffin told reporters on a conference call that the data aren’t just ugly — he doesn’t believe them.”

And the broadcast noted, “What the report says about air safety at the moment is pretty much nothing.”

The people of Pennsylvania, and across the United States, need usable information to make informed decisions.

We need open records reform . . . good open records reform.

“Our legislators may be close to passing a new open-records law,” wrote the Washington Observer-Reporter, “but will it be America’s best? According to Democracy Rising, Nebraska’s law is currently the nation’s best, both for the openness it guarantees and the act’s simplicity; it is just six pages long, compared with the 45 pages of exceptions to the law in Pennsylvania’s bill.”