It’s fascinating (and encouraging) to see Pennsylvania residents using the new right-to-know law and trying to make it work for them.
Demetra Stamus of Carbon County tried something interesting when she appealed the county’s denial of 911 audiotapes and other records related to a car crash in which her brother died.
As part of her appeal, she noted that the right-to-know law indicates that agencies can (my emphasis) release information that falls under an exemption if they believe the public interest in the material “outweighs the interest in non-disclosure.”
She argued that sets up a mandatory test by an agency, as opposed to simply opening the door for an agency to release information that’s exempt from the RTK law. And, she said, Carbon County didn’t do the test.
She lost; the open records office “does not find this argument persuasive,” it wrote in denying her appeal on May 1. It continued, “The OOR cannot compel the county to undertake a discretionary exercise.”
So, agencies can apply that test, but they don’t have to (my emphasis again). It’s tough to argue that agencies should be mandated to do the test every time they issue a denial; but it also is hard to fathom that any agency would voluntarily give up information that it didn’t have to (they seem to work hard enough as it is to try to keep public information private).
You would like to think, however, that if the public benefit outweighed the need to keep information private, an agency would release the information. Guess we’ll have to just wait and see.