Opinion: What do they have to hide? What do they have to hide?
July 21, 2009 | Filed in: Open
records | Government
transparency
OPINION
The [Hanover] Evening Sun
Sometimes it's hard to get a straight answer - even when we file a written request for one, then wait five business days and sometimes up to a month on top of that.
Just last week, a reporter of ours had to file a Right-to-Know request with Adams County for information that, while voluminous, is clearly public.
We were told we might have to wait a month for that information - the salaries of county employees before recent raises and pay cuts.
And if that recent records request goes anything like the last one we made to the county, we'll be less than satisfied when the wait is over.
For one reason or another, we've lately run into a number of examples of unusually high resistance to openness and transparency in local government.
It's not just Adams County, where our pending open-records request for salary information followed a less-than-satisfactory response to our request for a government efficiency report. The first request resulted in the county releasing 10 pages of the 38-page report on how the county might increase efficiency. (Did we mention that none of the 10 pages referred directly to Adams County, and the report was paid for by $90,000 in taxpayer money?)
We've also seen examples crop up in Gettysburg Borough and North Codorus Township. And all of this has taken place in the span of about a month.
North Codorus probably is the most curious example of what must be seen as heightened government secrecy.
The township has dumbed down its meeting minutes to include only minimal information - name and subject matter - when folks make public comments at meetings.
And the reason for the change, according to township officials, is that too many people complained the minutes from previous meetings were, among other things, incomplete.
So now they'll make them more incomplete. And on top of that, the township - which destroys audio recordings of meetings after the minutes are approved - is considering ending its practice of recording meetings altogether.
Township solicitor William H. Poole Jr. has said the township is within its rights regarding both matters because the township does not have to record meetings and can choose what to include in minutes.
He's right, but that's precisely our point. Why should any government have to walk so close to the line of what they can legally do when it comes to matters of openness?
What's the big deal about recording meetings and holding onto those recordings? The township already is making digital recordings. For literally pennies, the recording could be saved to a compact disc. And decades' worth of recordings could fit in a single desk drawer.
Gettysburg Borough also recently chose to make things more difficult than they need to be when a woman requested the borough's ordinance committee meet in public.
Debi Golden, who lives in Cumberland Township and co-owns Gettysburg Signs in the borough, believes the committee is required by the state's Sunshine Act to meet in public because the committee is an agency of the council.
But she had to file a lawsuit to get action on the matter, and the suit was thrown out on a legal technicality because it wasn't filed within 30 days of the alleged violation.
These are public officials, conducting business that is paid for by taxpayers and much of which affects residents' lives every day.
Why do so many of them think it's all right to hide whatever they can get away with?
Last year, when the Legislature passed Pennsylvania's new open-records law, we were hopeful that things would get better, especially because of the newly instituted presumption that all records are public unless specifically exempted.
Instead, officials seem to be staying up nights trying to figure out ways to stretch those exemptions and twist and tweak certain definitions to hide things.
It's not just wrong for officials to rely on technicalities and heavily nuanced legal definitions to get away with being so secretive. It's also time- and money-consuming.
Things would be a lot less complicated for everyone involved if they simply conducted business out in the open where any interested party could see what's going on.
And it might just stop people from asking, "What are they trying to hide?"
The [Hanover] Evening Sun
Sometimes it's hard to get a straight answer - even when we file a written request for one, then wait five business days and sometimes up to a month on top of that.
Just last week, a reporter of ours had to file a Right-to-Know request with Adams County for information that, while voluminous, is clearly public.
We were told we might have to wait a month for that information - the salaries of county employees before recent raises and pay cuts.
And if that recent records request goes anything like the last one we made to the county, we'll be less than satisfied when the wait is over.
For one reason or another, we've lately run into a number of examples of unusually high resistance to openness and transparency in local government.
It's not just Adams County, where our pending open-records request for salary information followed a less-than-satisfactory response to our request for a government efficiency report. The first request resulted in the county releasing 10 pages of the 38-page report on how the county might increase efficiency. (Did we mention that none of the 10 pages referred directly to Adams County, and the report was paid for by $90,000 in taxpayer money?)
We've also seen examples crop up in Gettysburg Borough and North Codorus Township. And all of this has taken place in the span of about a month.
North Codorus probably is the most curious example of what must be seen as heightened government secrecy.
The township has dumbed down its meeting minutes to include only minimal information - name and subject matter - when folks make public comments at meetings.
And the reason for the change, according to township officials, is that too many people complained the minutes from previous meetings were, among other things, incomplete.
So now they'll make them more incomplete. And on top of that, the township - which destroys audio recordings of meetings after the minutes are approved - is considering ending its practice of recording meetings altogether.
Township solicitor William H. Poole Jr. has said the township is within its rights regarding both matters because the township does not have to record meetings and can choose what to include in minutes.
He's right, but that's precisely our point. Why should any government have to walk so close to the line of what they can legally do when it comes to matters of openness?
What's the big deal about recording meetings and holding onto those recordings? The township already is making digital recordings. For literally pennies, the recording could be saved to a compact disc. And decades' worth of recordings could fit in a single desk drawer.
Gettysburg Borough also recently chose to make things more difficult than they need to be when a woman requested the borough's ordinance committee meet in public.
Debi Golden, who lives in Cumberland Township and co-owns Gettysburg Signs in the borough, believes the committee is required by the state's Sunshine Act to meet in public because the committee is an agency of the council.
But she had to file a lawsuit to get action on the matter, and the suit was thrown out on a legal technicality because it wasn't filed within 30 days of the alleged violation.
These are public officials, conducting business that is paid for by taxpayers and much of which affects residents' lives every day.
Why do so many of them think it's all right to hide whatever they can get away with?
Last year, when the Legislature passed Pennsylvania's new open-records law, we were hopeful that things would get better, especially because of the newly instituted presumption that all records are public unless specifically exempted.
Instead, officials seem to be staying up nights trying to figure out ways to stretch those exemptions and twist and tweak certain definitions to hide things.
It's not just wrong for officials to rely on technicalities and heavily nuanced legal definitions to get away with being so secretive. It's also time- and money-consuming.
Things would be a lot less complicated for everyone involved if they simply conducted business out in the open where any interested party could see what's going on.
And it might just stop people from asking, "What are they trying to hide?"