Better Government Association

Remember your Right to Know

July 10, 2008

It doesn’t matter why you want to know. It doesn’t matter what you do with what you know. Nor is it of any importance who wants to know.

Everyone has the right to know.

Not everything, but many things.

What people have the right to know is determined by laws passed by representatives of the people, although it sometimes doesn’t seem like it.

For example, the current Pennsylvania Open Records law, which expires at the end of the year, does not grant access to records of the commonwealth’s General Assembly, the very body of people who have the power to craft Right to Know laws, the very body of people who represent our interests.

In Pennsylvania the law was originally enacted in 1957; a major overhaul was undertaken in 2002 and even then the aforementioned major issue did not change.

But, come 2009, it will.

In 2002 a survey of Freedom of Information laws by the Better Government Association across the country ranked Pennsylvania number 48 based on procedural and penalty criteria. That’s 48 out of 50. That’s not good.

But we’d like to see a survey taken next year or sometime thereafter.

If indeed agencies follow the letter of the law when deciding if a record is open or closed, then 2009 may bode well for people all over the state. (To be sure, the new law does not open things up as much as some want.)

But many people want more: they want those in charge to feel the spirit that inspires the law, to understand fully why it is crucial to our representative democracy.

The right to inspect our leaders’ actions must be maintained, even at the most local level.

The people who temporarily work as administrators or serve as elected officials are, at the end of the day, simply citizens themselves — citizens who one day might find the need to make their own Right to Know request to the local government or the state or a Freedom of Information Act to a federal agency.

If local school and government boards do not embrace public inspection, then how can we be sure our leaders in the executive, judicial and legislative branches of the United States of America won’t decrease our rights bit by bit?

Sometimes rights must be preserved for rights’ sake, for fear of what could happen without them.

The Right to Know law isn’t just for journalists and it isn’t just for government scrutinizers.

It’s for everyone. Everyone has the Right to Know.

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