passopenrecords.org

Reminders of why we needed open records reform and fought so long and hard to get it . . .

• Judge Doris Smith-Ribner put an exclamation point on the extraordinary hubris of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency when she ordered it to pay $48,000 in legal fees for three news organizations that had to sue PHEAA for access to clearly public records.

Judge Smith-Ribner, of Commonwealth Court, acknowledged the obvious when she ruled that PHEAA knowingly and willfully violated the state’s Right-to-Know Law by refusing, for 20 months, to release financial information about its operation.

The Associated Press, The Patriot-News of Harrisburg and WTAE-TV of Pittsburgh had sought records of PHEAA’s spending on luxury junkets for its administrators, staff and board members. Of PHEAA’s 20 board members, 16 are state legislators.

• PHEAA, for me, is the poster child for why we need a strong open records law in Pennsylvania.

With a stroke of his pen, Gov. Rendell ended the days of financial and other government records being shrouded in a cloud of smoke and turned the spotlight on the doings of government agencies and elected officials.

Signing S.B. 1 into law is just half the battle. It is up to the people of Pennsylvania to take advantage of this new open-door policy, responsibly. What good is it to have information available if no one accesses it — or accesses it for the wrong reasons?

The purpose of having a strong open records law is to ensure that your trusted elected officials are worthy of your trust; that state agencies are using funds to make things better for you, not for themselves; that bills are crafted and passed because they are what’s best for the Commonwealth, not a lobbying firm.

Rep. Barbara McIlvaine Smith (D-West Chester)

• Four months, $100 worth of long-distance phone calls, meetings with an attorney and, finally, the intervention of then-House Speaker John Perzel’s office.

That’s what it took for Maya Patch to obtain copies of her local sewer authority’s spending records a few years ago.

“I wanted to see the books. I wanted to know about monies being spent, and I got a runaround. They said, ‘I’m not sure if you can look at that,’ or ‘We’ll give it to you next time,’” said Mrs. Patch, 70, of Carroll Township, Washington County.

“When somebody is evading you like that, you figure they’re hiding something. People have a right to know what’s going on,” she said.

On Thursday, Gov. Ed Rendell signed a law, long in the works, to make government records more accessible.

“There is a new attitude and a new approach” to providing records to the public, said House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese, D-Waynesburg. The law will be fully implemented in January.

“It’s going to be a total culture change for employees. They’re going from, ‘Well, it’s not open unless it fits into these narrow categories’ to ‘Everything is open unless it meets these few exceptions,’” said Craig Staudenmaier, a Harrisburg attorney specializing in public records cases.

“If we had opened these records up before, we wouldn’t have 90 percent of the problems we have,” said state Rep. Tim Mahoney (D-South Union), a freshman credited with pushing the reform measure.