Taxpayer costs add up in disputes over records
By Evan Brandt
The [Pottstown] Mercury
POTTSTOWN — As it turns out, freedom of information is not free.
The changes to Pennsylvania's Right to Know Law come at a cost to taxpayers, say officials with the Pottstown School District — $13,217 to be exact -- and that's just the legal fees.
Linda Adams is the school district's business manager.
She is also its designated Right to Know Officer, a post which Pennsylvania's new Right to Know Law requires all public entities fill with a trained employee.
As a result, Adams is the point person for all Right to Know requests made to the school district.
Also as a result, she has become a regular correspondent with Tom Hylton, civic activist and, thanks to the voters of Pottstown, a school board member as of Dec. 3.
She said he is unquestionably the person who has made the most information requests to the district under the new law. She estimated 90 percent of the costs noted above were related to requests from Hylton.
In the past year, Hylton's information requests, and the costs associated with them, have been cited at meetings and in posts on The Mercury's Web site, mostly when people accuse him of costing taxpayers money.
His reply is largely that the costs come only because the district is choosing to fight his requests for information which was provided routinely under previous administrations.
Ironically, in some ways the administration — whose antipathy toward Hylton's school board candidacy was one of the election cycle's worst kept secrets — has its handling of Hylton's Right to Know requests to thank for his presence on the board.
"When Jim Bush was business manager, he would give me just about any information I asked for and in great detail," Hylton said this week. "I never went to the Right to Know law when Jim Bush was here, and as a result there were no lawyers involved, because I always got the information I was looking for."
He also made the point that he has never experienced the obstacles with the borough in his information requests that he has with the school district.
As an example, Hylton said he requested the bills for Borough Solicitor Charles D. Garner Jr. and received them promptly.
But when he asked for the bills for School District Solicitor Stephen Kalis he was ignored until the new law was put into place, and even then it took months, and much of the information was redacted.
"As a citizen, I like the school board members to make decisions based on facts and, in the past, I have been able to bring out facts that the school board might not have considered," Hylton said.
But during the administration of Superintendent David Krem, Hylton said, "Suddenly, it became very difficult to get information out of the school district."
The obstructionism, Hylton said, was unfortunate.
"I mean I would think the philosophy is, if you're proud of what you're doing, you should want everyone to know about it," Hylton said.
And in a development that might be considered counterintuitive, the enactment of the Right to Know law reforms at times made it more difficult to get information out of the district, Hylton said.
As an example, he noted that he asked for a publication called Pottstown Demographics for 2009, which the district puts out every year. But because the one issued in 2009 cites figures for 2008, his request was denied because "the document doesn't exist," rather than simply providing the latest publication available.
Adams, who attended two training sessions on the law after being named the district's Right to Know Officer, said while she may think she knows what a requester wants, she has to be careful if a specific document is sought, particularly if it doesn't exist.
"Some of it turned into silly semantic differences," Hylton said.
Another, more recent example was a November board meeting during which Hylton's requests for information about teacher assignments and class enrollments at the high school — referred to at the meeting as a "master schedule" — as well as one-page resumes of the district's top officials were angrily refuted.
Monday, Adams said Hylton's requests were not formal Right to Know requests.
"We're getting criticized for not answering his Right to Know requests but he did not file one," she said.
Asked about this, Hylton produced a copy of a formal Right to Know request he made on Aug. 27 for several items, including the schedule information, as well as a Sept. 3 response, signed by Adams, in which she said the district could provide the schedule information by teacher subject, number of classes per subject and the enrollment per class, adding "please clarify if this abbreviated information is desired."
Hylton said the letter Adams said was referring to as not being a Right to Know request, was simply him asking Krem for information he had already requested formally through the Right to Know process, but this time as a prospective member of the school board.
Obstructionism of this type, Hylton said, left him little choice but to run for the board.
"I came to believe that maybe the board members are not getting all the information they might need and I had to make sure the public had all the information," he said.
However, he said even being a board member does not mean he gets information he has requested in a timely manner. "I'm still waiting for information I requested a week ago," he said Tuesday.
Adams said "we are not treating Mr. Hylton any differently than any other board member who has asked for information."
Those requests, she said, should go through a board committee and then to the full school board.
Overall, she said the legal costs for dealing with Right to Know requests will probably fall off as the issues raised in challenges and court cases get settled and are no longer open questions.
One of Hylton's requests, for example, was for the names of all district teachers, their home addresses and phone numbers. He was trying to find out how many of the people employed by the district paid taxes to the district, he said.
The district denied the request and Hylton appealed it to the state's new Open Records Office which upheld the repeal.
Adams said she resisted suggestions of challenging that decision and taking it to court, saying on balance it was better to provide the information than spend more taxpayer money on a court challenge.
But later, a court overturned a similar decision on a similar request in another school district, so if Hylton asked for the same information today, the district would have legal grounds to deny it.
In addition to the legal costs, Adams said the district must also shoulder soft costs — the cost of having office personnel locate documents, analyze them for relevance to the request and correspond about information requests.
On average, she said responding to information requests consumes 15 percent of her time. "There are times when it's 25 to 50 percent of my time because there is a time limit to responding," she said.
Then there is the cost of copying and postage, which the requester is supposed to cover with fees the district is permitted to charge under the law.
Some think it's cheaper, Adams said, to have it e-mailed.
"But that's actually more labor cost, because I'm not sending a live document that can be altered, so I have to convert it into a (PDF) and then we're not charging copying or postage," Adams said, "so it costs the taxpayers more."
Other than Hylton, Adams said the most frequent requests come from vendors and contractors, asking to see the contracts and bids of their competitors.
There are some things, Adams said, that she does not think should be public documents, such as school floor plans. "They found plans to some schools in Iran," Adams noted.
But despite what she steadfastly maintains are the "burdens" of the new law, Adams said, "Overall, it's probably a good law. People have a right to know what's going on."
And while he and Adams may have disagreed over what information the district should provide, Hylton does agree with Adams that overall, the law is a good thing.
"The difference is, before, if you were denied, you had nowhere to go other than to court, and that could get awfully expensive," Hylton said.
"Under the old law, your only other option was to appeal to the public and it's much easier to be ignored," Hylton said.
"Once the new law was in place, you got a response and if you didn't like it you could take it to an arbiter without the expense of an attorney," said Hylton. "And the inclination of that office is that most things are an open record."
The [Pottstown] Mercury
POTTSTOWN — As it turns out, freedom of information is not free.
The changes to Pennsylvania's Right to Know Law come at a cost to taxpayers, say officials with the Pottstown School District — $13,217 to be exact -- and that's just the legal fees.
Linda Adams is the school district's business manager.
She is also its designated Right to Know Officer, a post which Pennsylvania's new Right to Know Law requires all public entities fill with a trained employee.
As a result, Adams is the point person for all Right to Know requests made to the school district.
Also as a result, she has become a regular correspondent with Tom Hylton, civic activist and, thanks to the voters of Pottstown, a school board member as of Dec. 3.
She said he is unquestionably the person who has made the most information requests to the district under the new law. She estimated 90 percent of the costs noted above were related to requests from Hylton.
In the past year, Hylton's information requests, and the costs associated with them, have been cited at meetings and in posts on The Mercury's Web site, mostly when people accuse him of costing taxpayers money.
His reply is largely that the costs come only because the district is choosing to fight his requests for information which was provided routinely under previous administrations.
Ironically, in some ways the administration — whose antipathy toward Hylton's school board candidacy was one of the election cycle's worst kept secrets — has its handling of Hylton's Right to Know requests to thank for his presence on the board.
"When Jim Bush was business manager, he would give me just about any information I asked for and in great detail," Hylton said this week. "I never went to the Right to Know law when Jim Bush was here, and as a result there were no lawyers involved, because I always got the information I was looking for."
He also made the point that he has never experienced the obstacles with the borough in his information requests that he has with the school district.
As an example, Hylton said he requested the bills for Borough Solicitor Charles D. Garner Jr. and received them promptly.
But when he asked for the bills for School District Solicitor Stephen Kalis he was ignored until the new law was put into place, and even then it took months, and much of the information was redacted.
"As a citizen, I like the school board members to make decisions based on facts and, in the past, I have been able to bring out facts that the school board might not have considered," Hylton said.
But during the administration of Superintendent David Krem, Hylton said, "Suddenly, it became very difficult to get information out of the school district."
The obstructionism, Hylton said, was unfortunate.
"I mean I would think the philosophy is, if you're proud of what you're doing, you should want everyone to know about it," Hylton said.
And in a development that might be considered counterintuitive, the enactment of the Right to Know law reforms at times made it more difficult to get information out of the district, Hylton said.
As an example, he noted that he asked for a publication called Pottstown Demographics for 2009, which the district puts out every year. But because the one issued in 2009 cites figures for 2008, his request was denied because "the document doesn't exist," rather than simply providing the latest publication available.
Adams, who attended two training sessions on the law after being named the district's Right to Know Officer, said while she may think she knows what a requester wants, she has to be careful if a specific document is sought, particularly if it doesn't exist.
"Some of it turned into silly semantic differences," Hylton said.
Another, more recent example was a November board meeting during which Hylton's requests for information about teacher assignments and class enrollments at the high school — referred to at the meeting as a "master schedule" — as well as one-page resumes of the district's top officials were angrily refuted.
Monday, Adams said Hylton's requests were not formal Right to Know requests.
"We're getting criticized for not answering his Right to Know requests but he did not file one," she said.
Asked about this, Hylton produced a copy of a formal Right to Know request he made on Aug. 27 for several items, including the schedule information, as well as a Sept. 3 response, signed by Adams, in which she said the district could provide the schedule information by teacher subject, number of classes per subject and the enrollment per class, adding "please clarify if this abbreviated information is desired."
Hylton said the letter Adams said was referring to as not being a Right to Know request, was simply him asking Krem for information he had already requested formally through the Right to Know process, but this time as a prospective member of the school board.
Obstructionism of this type, Hylton said, left him little choice but to run for the board.
"I came to believe that maybe the board members are not getting all the information they might need and I had to make sure the public had all the information," he said.
However, he said even being a board member does not mean he gets information he has requested in a timely manner. "I'm still waiting for information I requested a week ago," he said Tuesday.
Adams said "we are not treating Mr. Hylton any differently than any other board member who has asked for information."
Those requests, she said, should go through a board committee and then to the full school board.
Overall, she said the legal costs for dealing with Right to Know requests will probably fall off as the issues raised in challenges and court cases get settled and are no longer open questions.
One of Hylton's requests, for example, was for the names of all district teachers, their home addresses and phone numbers. He was trying to find out how many of the people employed by the district paid taxes to the district, he said.
The district denied the request and Hylton appealed it to the state's new Open Records Office which upheld the repeal.
Adams said she resisted suggestions of challenging that decision and taking it to court, saying on balance it was better to provide the information than spend more taxpayer money on a court challenge.
But later, a court overturned a similar decision on a similar request in another school district, so if Hylton asked for the same information today, the district would have legal grounds to deny it.
In addition to the legal costs, Adams said the district must also shoulder soft costs — the cost of having office personnel locate documents, analyze them for relevance to the request and correspond about information requests.
On average, she said responding to information requests consumes 15 percent of her time. "There are times when it's 25 to 50 percent of my time because there is a time limit to responding," she said.
Then there is the cost of copying and postage, which the requester is supposed to cover with fees the district is permitted to charge under the law.
Some think it's cheaper, Adams said, to have it e-mailed.
"But that's actually more labor cost, because I'm not sending a live document that can be altered, so I have to convert it into a (PDF) and then we're not charging copying or postage," Adams said, "so it costs the taxpayers more."
Other than Hylton, Adams said the most frequent requests come from vendors and contractors, asking to see the contracts and bids of their competitors.
There are some things, Adams said, that she does not think should be public documents, such as school floor plans. "They found plans to some schools in Iran," Adams noted.
But despite what she steadfastly maintains are the "burdens" of the new law, Adams said, "Overall, it's probably a good law. People have a right to know what's going on."
And while he and Adams may have disagreed over what information the district should provide, Hylton does agree with Adams that overall, the law is a good thing.
"The difference is, before, if you were denied, you had nowhere to go other than to court, and that could get awfully expensive," Hylton said.
"Under the old law, your only other option was to appeal to the public and it's much easier to be ignored," Hylton said.
"Once the new law was in place, you got a response and if you didn't like it you could take it to an arbiter without the expense of an attorney," said Hylton. "And the inclination of that office is that most things are an open record."