York Daily Record editorial
Assorted thoughts on assorted subjects:
Let the sun shine
Cheers to York County solicitor Mike Flannelly for confirming one of our predictions from several years ago when the state’s new open records law was being debated:
A more liberal open records law would be a bigger boon to businesses and regular citizens than to “the media.”
State lawmakers dragged their feet on improving the state’s restrictive records law for years because they said it was mainly a media issue that regular folks didn’t care about.
Wrong.
Mr. Flannelly recently shared some statistics about records requests at county agencies for last year. He said 2014 was a record year for record requests — with 209 right-to-know bids.
About 58 percent of those requests came from businesses. Flannelly said that number is probably higher because many of the 25.36 percent coming from “individuals” might actually serve a business function.
The county fielded just 13 open records requests from media outlets.
That squares with statistics we’ve seen across the state over several years.
Citizens want to know what their government is up to, and they have a right to see those records. If anything, state lawmakers should reform the law to allow even more sun to shine in.
New records chief
Speaking of the state open records law: The legislation created a special office to act as a referee in disputes over records requests — a sensible idea because it heads off some expensive and time-consuming litigation.
Terry Mutchler did an excellent job running that office.
But Gov. Tom Corbett did not reappoint her to the position.
Instead, he put a former Republican spokesman for the state Senate in charge of the office, Erik Arneson.
That’s not necessarily a bad choice. He’s a former reporter, and he worked with Sen. Dominic Pileggi on the open records legislation, so he has a deep knowledge of the law and its intent.
But the appointment process was criticized by Gov. Tom Wolf as being secretive and done behind closed doors. If accurate, that’s not the best way to fill an open records chief slot.
Mr. Arneson also has some big shoes to fill. Ms. Mutchler did a good job and deserved to keep it.
For now, though, let’s just keep an open mind on this new open records chief.
Give Northern some time
The Northern York County School District has handled the potential transfer of Washington Township from the Dover Area School District in a pretty even-handed manner.
Board members didn’t actively oppose the move — or court it. In fact, the board has had an officially neutral stance on the proposal.
But now the Northern board is asking for something in this process, and it ought to be granted.
This week, board members reaffirmed their neutral stance on the proposal, which will ultimately be decided by the state Education Department and/or the court.
If that happens, the board asked, delay it for two years to allow the district time to properly prepare.
Yes, that seems like reasonable request to deal with the logistics of having 300 new students.