Newspaper: Open Records Office blows it

Talk about failing to live up to your name.

Operating for just three months, Pennsylvania's new Open Records Office has already made a bonehead decision on a clear case of a school board violating the state's Sunshine Act.

The office's decision to side with the school board in denying the public access to budget information has been criticized by the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, and is the subject of an editorial in The Pottstown Mercury.

"These are public access laws and if they're going to be interpreted, I think they should be interpreted on the side of public access," Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the association, told The Associated Press.

Melewsky was responding to a dispute between the Allentown Morning Call and the Northampton Area School Board, which denied a reporter's access to preliminary budget information.

From The Mercury editorial:

Pennsylvania's open-meetings law — also called the Sunshine Act — defines "deliberation" as "the discussion of agency business held for the purpose of making a decision."

Melewsky said the Right-to-Know and open-meetings laws are intended to ensure public access to most agency deliberations, whether they are confined to the day of the vote or unfold over the course of weeks.

"If we don't have the documents to follow along in those discussions, then the Sunshine Act and (the provision of the Right-to-Know Law) could be rendered meaningless," she said.

The newspaper association, which lobbied for last year's overhaul of one of the nation's weakest open-records laws, warned that the decision could turn back the clock by more than two decades to a time when the open-meetings law required policy-makers to hold open meetings only when they were voting or taking official action — allowing them to debate issues and make decisions behind closed doors.

Read the full editorial at the newspaper's Web site.