911 logs disagreement points out issues in RTK law
July 12, 2009
By Scott Blanchard
RECORD TRACKER blog
York Daily Record/Sunday News
The York Daily Record/Sunday News and York County are headed to court over the newspaper's request for what the state deems a public record: 911 time-response logs. Rick Lee has a story in today's paper.
The state's new right-to-know law made time-response logs public, but it did not define what a time-response log is. That's what the court hearing is about: The state's open records office agreed with the Daily Record/Sunday News that addresses or geographical identifiers had to be part of time-response logs; the county, in its appeal to Common Pleas Court, acknowledges that information would allow people to assess emergency time response, but says releasing addresses would violate the privacy of people who call 911.
You can read Rick's story for more details and to see how the county and newspaper defend their positions. But the case itself raises several points about the new open records law:
RECORD TRACKER blog
York Daily Record/Sunday News
The York Daily Record/Sunday News and York County are headed to court over the newspaper's request for what the state deems a public record: 911 time-response logs. Rick Lee has a story in today's paper.
The state's new right-to-know law made time-response logs public, but it did not define what a time-response log is. That's what the court hearing is about: The state's open records office agreed with the Daily Record/Sunday News that addresses or geographical identifiers had to be part of time-response logs; the county, in its appeal to Common Pleas Court, acknowledges that information would allow people to assess emergency time response, but says releasing addresses would violate the privacy of people who call 911.
You can read Rick's story for more details and to see how the county and newspaper defend their positions. But the case itself raises several points about the new open records law:
- The law is set up so that whoever loses an appeal to the state OOR can take a requester to court. An institution such as a newspaper can pay a lawyer to represent it. But what about a resident in a township who is denied a record?
- The law did not define certain types of records, such as 911 time-response logs, even as it explicitly made those logs available to the public. That opened the door for agencies like York County to provide their own definitions -- and in York County's case, its definition does not match what the lawmaker who wrote the bill wanted. (Lancaster County, for example, does provide cross-streets with its 911 time-response logs).
- The new right-to-know law flipped the definition of a public record from a document that only met certain criteria to all documents unless they meet certain criteria to be kept private. But it apparently did not usher in a new era of openness in state or local government. Through July 7, the open records office had received 584 appeals of denied records. That's 81 a month since the law went into effect, or more than two a day. And that's only the denials that have been appealed.
