County of York v. Office of Open Records
Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania
No. 2584, C.D. 2009
February 16, 2011
The Commonwealth Court ruled that destination addresses in 911 time response logs are not exempt under the Right to Know Law, and counties must provide cross-street information about the location to which emergency responders were dispatched.
Background
A reporter for the York Daily Record submitted a Right to Know Law request to York County seeking the County’s 911 time response logs with destination addresses. The county granted the request for the logs, but denied the reporter’s request for destination information.
On appeal, the Office of Open Records ordered the county to provide the information, but that decision was reversed by a county court.
The newspaper then appealed to the Commonwealth Court.
Commonwealth Court Decision
Under the RTKL, a government record is accessible to the public unless the governmental agency can prove the record is exempt under the RTKL’s exemptions, another state or federal law, or a legal privilege.
The RTKL provides that 911 “time response logs” are public records. Thus, the only issue before the Commonwealth Court was whether addresses fall within the information included in “time response logs.”
To answer this question, the court looked to the General Assembly’s intent when drafting the RTKL and concluded that the legislature did not intend for addresses contained in time response logs to be exempt from disclosure. Rather, the General Assembly provided access to the logs to allow citizens to evaluate “the efficiency of each county’s emergency response to various 911 calls.”
Without address information, there is no way to determine whether the response was timely or deficient. Therefore, the Court held that destination addresses are included in time response logs and thus public under the RTKL.
Nevertheless, it ruled that the county could substitute cross-street addresses for the actual destination addresses in this case.