The public cannot consider what it can’t see. The axiom was invoked by some journalist long, long ago in a general excoriation of public officials conducting the public’s business in cloaks of secrecy.
Such behavior in the prosecution of public policy never is acceptable – no matter if those “exceptions” were nefariously carved into law or involve public officials confiscating our right to know.
And certainly not in times of crises, such as the coronavirus pandemic.
In Pennsylvania (and we’re sure elsewhere), the pandemic appears to have provided Pennsylvania public officials with a modicum of cloaking bravery. Spotlight PA, a consortium of Keystone State media outlets, highlighted one last week.
“More than a month after the process was first announced, there is still no timeline for when Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration will release the list of Pennsylvania businesses that received coveted waivers and were allowed to reopen during the ongoing COVID-19 shutdown,” the dispatch noted.
“During a hearing Thursday, members of the Republican-controlled state Senate lambasted the secretive nature of the waiver process, arguing the state was deciding the fate of businesses without providing any transparency, leading to confusion and inconsistencies, even among businesses in the same industry.”
Translation: A bureaucratic failure that raises suspicions of something more.
But this is fundamental “stuff,” for lack of a better word. The government funded by the people has an obligation to make public policy decisions public, in good times and in bad.
Failure to do so raises gale-force-wind-whipped flags that government is hiding something, anything from ineptness to cronyism to outright fraud.
As Spotlight PA reports, those decisions were handled by employees of the state Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) which, as we note, has been a bastion of secrecy to cover its standard operating nature of gross incompetence for decades.
“(T)he administration has so far rebuked or ignored a host of media requests for the criteria used to make those decisions as well as a list of waivers approved, denied, or approved and then revoked.
“Under the governor’s emergency order, state agencies have largely stopped processing public records requests,” the consortium notes.
But that’s not acceptable. The public’s right to know the business of its government in these pandemic times must be considered no less an “essential business” than any of those arbitrarily bequeathed with that status in darkness by the DCED.
Dennis Davin, the former Allegheny County economic development guru, now runs the DCED. He came up with all kinds of excuses for the agency not doing its job and then threw a small bone to critics:
“Mr. Davin said the department is working on releasing information to the Legislature but is not yet prepared to do it,” Spotlight PA reported.
Even that doesn’t cut it. As a matter of course, those requests should have been, in the least, posted online upon receipt and then any dispositions posted as they were decided.
Of course, by the time DCED does do its job, if ever, the damage will have been done — not only to businesses stiffed by bureaucrats working out of sunshine’s reach but also to the detriment of open government.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
