By Jan Murphy
The Patriot-News | PennLive.com
Signaling a commitment to transparency from Day One, Gov.-elect Tom Wolf is expected to sign a executive order on Tuesday about openness in government and follow it up with training on Wednesday for himself and his Cabinet on the state’s Right to Know Law.
Delivering that training will not be Gov. Tom Corbett’s newly installed executive director of the Office of Open Records Erik Arneson, however. The trainer instead will be Arneson’s predecessor Terry Mutchler who resigned on Jan. 9 after it became apparent Corbett was not going to re-appoint her to another six-year term.
“Terry is recognized as a national champion of transparency and has years of experience in open records. Nobody is better,” said Wolf spokesman Jeff Sheridan.
Mutchler now spearheads the transparency practice in the Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton’s Media and Communications Practice Group. Sheridan said the training will be provided free of charge.
As the person who is credited with establishing the state’s first-ever Office of Open Records in 2008, Mutchler said she sees this move by Wolf as a watershed moment for state government.
“It’s the first administration that sought transparency training right out of the gate,” Mutchler said on Tuesday. “As an expert on transparency, to me, that signals for this governor that transparency is more than a policy on paper. It’s going to be practiced.”
She said when she was the open records office’s executive director, she made repeated offers to train both former Gov. Ed Rendell and Corbett and their Cabinet members about the in’s and out’s of the Right to Know Law. She said those invitations were never accepted but they did allow her to provide the training to their lawyers.
But providing the training directly to the governor and Cabinet members demonstrates to Mutchler that Wolf believes that when it comes to transparency in government, “it’s got to be all hands on deck” and “is kind of a call to arms in open government in the commonwealth.”
As for why she thinks he chose her to provide the training and not Arneson, who as a former Senate GOP staffer helped craft the current version of the Right to Know Law, Mutchler said, “there’s enough transparency work to go around. I feel very honored the governor asked me in my capacity at Pepper Hamilton to show them the blueprint.”
A call to Arneson on Tuesday morning was not immediately returned.