passopenrecords.org

The headline in the Bucks County Courier-Times makes your blood run cold: “Caller put on hold, dies in house fire.”

Christina Kristofic’s story tells of a woman, Brenda Orr, who called 911 the morning of January 29, saying her bed was on fire and she could not get out. She was put on hold for almost a minute.

“We’re concerned about the minute that’s missing,” Doylestown police Chief James Donnelly said this week. “Had we had that minute, I’m not saying for sure that we could have saved her, but we would have been a minute closer.”

But Orr was confined by multiple sclerosis to her bed, where she reportedly smoked cigarettes — which is one possible, but as yet unconfirmed, cause of the fire.

The story has elements of great courage as well as tragic errors, as rescuers battled unbearable heat in a vain effort to save Brenda Orr’s life. They were ultimately turned back by the force of the fire.

There is much the public needs to know about what went wrong that morning in Doylestown. And there is much it should know as well about the bravery of several of its public employees. But here are two things we know now:

• The Doylestown Intelligencer obtained the information it published through a right-to-know request; and

• 911 dispatch associations are trying to restrict public access to information on such calls. It is, they say, a matter of victim privacy — although it is, of course too late to get Brenda Orr’s views on her privacy.

But it is also a matter of public safety and government responsibility, and Bucks County officials have acknowledged that proper procedures were not followed in this case . . . although they will not say precisely what procedures or how they were breached.

As Borough Council President Det Ansinn told the Courier-Times: “We need to understand from the county what happened and what can be done to not have that happen again. We have a tragedy here. And there’s always questions following a tragedy. We want to make sure we do our best as a borough to limit the possibility of a tragedy happening again. . . .

“No comment,” he said, “is not a sufficient response for our first responders and our law enforcement officials. . . . we need to have confidence in this system.”

We all need to have confidence in the system. And that confidence comes from the transparency of open records and the accountability that comes with public scrutiny.

We have been down this road so many times before . . . Remember last year, after the I-35 bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, when PennDOT refused to release information on the state of Pennsylvania’s bridges because: “There’s a fear that the general public might not understand what those [bridge ranking] numbers mean. It might set off undue concern.”

Well, yes. . . .

“By now it’s pretty clear,” wrote Paul Sunyak of the Herald-Standard of Uniontown on a recent blog post, “that Republicans in the state House aren’t interested in passing an open records bill until they’ve exhausted every stalling tactic in the book. . . .[S]uddenly they want to hear more from 9-1-1 dispatchers, who don’t support letting courts decide if a transcript of a fire, police or ambulance call should be made public.”

“It would be possible to ping-pong a rewrite of the Open Records Law between the chambers virtually forever,” Erik Arneson, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R-Delaware), the main sponsor of the pending bill, recently told Capitolwire.

Not just virtually. . . .

It is time to get on with it.