Public service vs. public nuisance

HARRISBURG - What one group is calling a public service is to another a frivolous stunt.

The dispute: a contest being sponsored by the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association aimed at illustrating the difficulty Pennsylvanians face in obtaining public records.

As part of the contest, which began last month, Pennsylvania residents as well as students in journalism schools are being asked to obtain a document, such as a school superintendent's contract, through an open-records request.

But local governments and school boards, the likely recipients of the majority of requests, are irked. They are complaining that the contest will cause public employees to waste valuable time - and taxpayer dollars - responding to what they are characterizing as "frivolous" requests.

"We have been strongly supportive of open access and transparency," said Thomas J. Gentzel, executive director of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, "but we believe the attitude behind this is to create a hardship for local governments and then point to that as proof that there is a problem."

Added Douglas E. Hill, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, in a statement: "It is unconscionable for an organization that claims to protect the people's interests to advocate clogging up public offices with busywork requests to satisfy a contest."

The newspaper association said it was disappointed by the criticism.

Teri Henning, general counsel for the association, said the purpose of the contest, called the PA Open Records Challenge, is to encourage the public to get to know how their government works and gain firsthand knowledge of the state's Right-to-Know act.

Such knowledge, she said, is part of what makes for a strong democracy.

"The idea that it's inappropriate to encourage citizens to participate in their government is discouraging, to say the least," Henning said in an interview Friday.

The latest rift comes as open-records reform is being debated in the Capitol.

Two bills that would broaden access to public records are winding through the House and Senate, and the issue is bound to be a key item on the legislative agenda this fall.

Both bills seek something unprecedented in Pennsylvania: a presumption that all government records should be open to the public.

Gentzel said that the School Boards Association, part of the Pennsylvania Local Government Conference, has been active in discussions about such proposed changes to the state's open-public-records law, and is "generally supportive" of broadening access to government records.

But he called the contest being pushed by the newspaper association "an unfortunate idea."

He could not, however, name any specific district that had been inundated with requests related to the contest.

The newspaper association could not say how many people are participating in the Open Records Challenge, which has been advertised to newspapers, journalism schools in the state and citizen groups.

But, said Henning, with more than 5,000 local agencies in Pennsylvania, the contest should not place an undue burden on any one municipality.

"We believe that citizen participation is critical as we move forward with open-records reform in Pennsylvania," she said. "Unfortunately, the response by the Local Government Conference makes it clear that we have a lot of work ahead of us."