New Pa. public-records law: lots of requests ... & lawsuits

Since the beginning of the year, a new Pennsylvania law on public records has been sending tremors through state and local governments.

Unprecedented numbers of citizens, civic groups, reporters and businesses have filed thousands of requests for government documents and data.

Now come the aftershocks: Dozens of public-record lawsuits are piling up in courthouses around the state, waiting for judges to spit out rulings on what the law really means.

In Philadelphia, a retired police sergeant named Jihad Ali wants the names and salaries of everyone working for the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., the quasi-public agency involved in most of the city's big economic-development deals for the past 50 years. The state's Office of Open Records (OOR) says that he's entitled to the information, but PIDC is appealing to Common Pleas Court.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review asked for a spreadsheet of Pennsylvania projects funded with homeland security grants. The state's Office of Emergency Preparedness provided a 278-page list in a PDF format - but without the names of municipalities receiving the grants, or any other information on where the projects are. The newspaper is appealing to Commonwealth Court.

The Inquirer has asked for the home addresses of more than 20,000 city employees. The Office of Open Records says that the new state law establishes a public right to those addresses, but the city is appealing to Common Pleas Court.

The new law is more detailed than the old one in specifying which government records are open to the public and which are not.

It also created the OOR, a state agency to act as a first-stage arbiter when there's a dispute over a record being public or not.

In just eight months, the OOR has handled more than 4,500 e-mails and phone inquiries, about evenly split between people wanting to get information and government agencies wondering if they have to provide it.

The office has issued more than 450 written opinions. More than half the time, the office has ruled against the requester. But it has created a small firestorm of controversy with several rulings that would force public agencies to disclose the home addresses of employees.

The new law could be a victim of its own success.

As of yesterday, 55 rulings from the OOR have been appealed to local or state courts, where county and appellate judges will ultimately decide which government records the public is entitled to see.