Quantcast
Channel: Record Tracker » appeal
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 10

A RTK response omission: On purpose, or by mistake?

0
0

A guy just walked into our office with some questions about the response to an open-records request he’d gotten from a York County municipality.

The municipality — to its credit — had given him a lot of the info he’d asked for. But he wondered why a couple things seemed to be missing and what to do about it.

He showed me that he’d requested (among many other things) a list of a particular department’s employees, positions and salaries. What he got was a list of employee names (with several redacted) on one sheet of paper, and on another, a list of positions and salaries — what appeared to me to be a salary scale.

From what he got, there was no way he could tell which employees were in what positions, and/or how much they were making.

I suggested he ask the municipality to fill the request properly, but if that didn’t work, said he should appeal and cite two reasons — one, the municipality did not explain the redactions as required; and two, it did not provide the list of employee names/positions/salaries that he’d requested.

It may have been an unintentional mistake on the municipality’s part. As I said, it did provide a lot of the info he asked for.

On the other hand, I can see the municipality’s response to the appeal being, “We don’t have a list of employees with positions and salaries, and the law says we’re not required to create one.” In which case, it would be another example of poor customer service — and of hiding behind the letter of the law instead of fulfilling its spirit — when it comes to the right-to-know law.

I asked him to let me know how things turn out.

Have you had a similar experience with a right-to-know request?


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 10

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images