Open Access to Public Records Allows Citizens to be Informed

When the Beaver County Times sought the ratings assigned to bridges following their inspection last April, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation denied the request on the grounds that they were "internal documents," the release of which could endanger public security.

Transportation Secretary Allen Biehler had an epiphany of sorts this week when he agreed, after first refusing, to make bridge ratings public at the request of state Rep. Babette Josephs, chairman of the state House Government Committee. Biehler called it a "judgment call."

But the collapse of the main span of Interstate 35W in Minnesota, the urgings of Gov. Ed Rendell to release the information and Josephs' insistence may have helped the secretary to see the virtues of governmental transparency.

The fact is, however, that government officials and clerks routinely make judgment calls about what is the public's business and what isn't, and denying or providing records to the public on the basis of little more than whim.

Six hours of testimony before Josephs' committee this week offered up a litany of examples of why the state's Open Records Law is widely considered the weakest in the country.

Here's one of our own: For four weeks The Patriot-News has sought, without success, inspection records from the City of Harrisburg for its roughly 175 eating and drinking establishments.

Government inspections of restaurants are conducted for the purpose of protecting public health, one element of which should consist of making such inspection reports publicly available.

Go to the Web site of the state Department of Agriculture (www.agriculture.state.pa.us) and one has no trouble finding the reports for every restaurant inspected by the state.

But counties, cities, townships and boroughs with their own health departments can opt to conduct restaurant inspections, the results of which are not posted on the Agriculture Department site.

This is a case, not uncommon, where different levels of government interpret the same Open Records Law and their moral obligation to keep the public informed dramatically differently.

Whether local, state or national, government is supposed to work for and be responsive to us, the people. Yet, there are legions of folks working in government who don't get it, as if they were employed by a secret society in which individual members of the press and public are considered a nuisance.

Pennsylvania needs a Right-to-Know Law that abolishes the notion that providing public records to the public is a judgment call. It needs a law that presumes that the public has a right to see all records, unless they have been excepted in law for a specific purpose.

If it contains serious penalties for nonconformance, such a law will finally remove the barriers to full disclosure at state and local levels, and will remind those government workers who may have forgotten on whose behalf they are employed.

And one would hope it would spur a move to require all restaurant inspection reports, whether conducted locally or by the state, to be available on the Agriculture Department Web site. Meanwhile, Mayor Stephen R. Reed would be well advised to make a judgment call on the side of openness.

Reference: ThePatriotNews


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