TodaySenate progressing on open records law
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Article RatingWe’re almost there.
The state Senate voted unanimously this week to approve a new open records law that will be a major improvement over current law, which, as we have noted in the past, is one of the weakest in the country when it comes to establishing the right of the public to know what public officials are up to.
Once again, though, there remain differences between what the Senate has approved and what is in a competing bill in the state House. Both bills start out with the most crucial advance in Pennsylvanians’ rights: the “flip of presumption,” in which the government must show why a particular piece of information cannot be publicly disclosed, rather than forcing a citizen to justify why the information should be released.
The new Senate bill defines legislative records as public documents, as well as those of community colleges, the State System of Higher Education and the four state-related universities, outside a narrow list of exceptions. Records from 911 dispatchers could be made public if a judge or the local government agrees that disclosure outweighs privacy concerns.
Correspondence between lawmakers and lobbyists would also be made available under certain circumstances in the Senate bill, as would any opinion polls commissioned by any state or local agency.
Individual state agencies will have an open-records officer who will manage requests for records. An Office of Open Records would be created under the Department of Community and Economic Development, and fines of up to $1,500 would be assessed against officials who fail to comply with the new law.
The Pennsylvania Newspaper Association hailed the Senate bill in an Associated Press story printed in Thursday’s Sentinel, saying the bill would achieve all the group’s major goals. Common Cause had a less favorable reaction, saying the open records office should be under the Ethics Commission rather than an executive branch department.
Likewise, House members were guarded about the Senate bill’s prospects, with provisions allowing disclosure of state employees’ addresses and dates of birth raising flags for them.
We are concerned about the bill listing autopsy records as an exception from the open records law. While we understand there are privacy concerns in this Internet age, we’re also aware that many important investigations regarding wrongful convictions, misdiagnosed causes of death, vehicle crash reconstructions, police brutality cases and more have relied on autopsy records.
It may be that this provision won’t keep responsible investigations outside the law enforcement community from going forward, but it is likely that cases involving official wrongdoing will be tougher to uncover with this blanket exception.
Considering that earlier versions of the bill had such wide-open loopholes as an exception from disclosure for all e-mailed correspondence, we’re gratified to see that the bill has made so much progress. It’s time, however, for this process to reach a conclusion, and we hope the House’s deliberations will lead us to a bill the governor can sign sooner rather than later.
