Sunshine Week presses for more open government
HARRISBURG – Last month alone, newspapers from around the state called the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association’s legal hotline to report they were being denied budget documents, school superintendent contracts, a town’s bills and invoices, settlement agreements, salary information for public employees, the people on a town’s civil service list and a county’s completed audit. All of which leads Debra Gersh Hernandez, spokeswoman for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, to say that access to public records isn’t a journalism issue, but a good government issue.
“Openness is a basic tenet of democracy,” she said. “People have to know what’s going on in their government.”
This week is Sunshine Week, a nationwide effort to let people know which public records they’re entitled to see and to pressure lawmakers to change rusty, poorly written or too strict statutes that keep citizens from peeping behind the curtain of governmental secrecy.
And it’s not just the media or grassroots groups who think more daylight needs to be shed on the business of elected officials. State Rep. Paul Clymer (R-Bucks) has 24 years’ experience in Harrisburg, and he said lawmakers can do better.
The most glaring example is Pennsylvania’s failure to have a lobbyist disclosure law, he said.
“We need to make public the amount of money being spent by those who are paying the lobbyists,” said Clymer. “The public needs to know how many dollars are being spent to lobby specific issues.”
Lobbyists have been operating without a watchdog since the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out the disclosure law in 2002. Clymer, who is chairman of the House State Government Committee, said he hopes to move a new disclosure bill out of his committee and onto the House floor today.
The bedrock of making sure people have access to the government’s doings is The Right to Know law. But Teri Henning, media law counsel to the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, said that law’s presumption against granting access is a fundamental flaw.
While the federal Freedom of Information Act presumes government records are public, Pennsylvania’s law has two categories of public records, and whoever requests the records has to prove a document falls within those categories, she said.
Furthermore, Henning said the definition of “public record” was drafted in 1957 and has not been changed significantly since then. The result is that government agencies feel confident in denying access to records because they know most people don’t have the time, money or skill to go through the courts and get what they want, she said.
“We are entitled to know how public agencies are spending our money,” Henning wrote in an e-mail response to questions. “We should be able to track their spending and decision-making, without having to prove that each individual document that we want to see meets their narrow definition of ‘public record'”
But state Rep. Dave Steil (R-Bucks) said that when the Legislature amended the open records law in 2002, it tried to balance the public’s right to know with public officials’ need to conduct sensitive business, like personnel issues.
The problem, Steil said, is that too often whether a citizen gets the information he or she requests depends on the attitude of a township’s or borough’s workers.
“Some are well-trained while others have the attitude of ‘Why are you here?'” he said. “I think the law is good but municipalities can do more about treating citizens with respect. More training is needed.”
Like Clymer, Steil said the lobbying sector needs more openness. He said the state should also demand full disclosure of a candidate’s campaign finances.
“Where did the elected official get his money from? Who entertains him?” he asked.
Hernandez of the American Society of Newspapers said many people like to say that government became more secretive after Sept. 11, 2001. And she said there are examples to back that up, like The Patriot Act, the secrecy behind Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force, the barring of photos of caskets carrying U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and even HIPAA, the medical privacy act.
“Because police officers and hospitals are unsure of what can be released, they are not releasing anything,” she said, repeating a frequent criticism made about HIPAA.
All of which strengthens the case for letting in more sunshine at all levels of government, she said.
“This week is about raising awareness of the problem,” said Hernandez. “And the offshoot of that is that we hope to be heard by state and federal lawmakers.”
Rick Martinez can be reached at 717-705-6330 or rmartinez@calkins-media.com.