Friday last, we recalled the colluding skulduggery four years ago of the City of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County and the Allegheny Conference on Community Development attempting to hide government’s bid to lure a second Amazon headquarters to Pittsburgh.
“Collusion” wasn’t our assessment but, essentially, the conclusion of an Allegheny County judge on the trio’s establishment of a shell organization designed to circumvent Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law.
And a Friday story, in the Tribune-Review, highlights what we believe to be a continuing problem with the law and an affront to sound public policy.
In the Trib’s latest update on the federal drug charge arrest and resignation of Greensburg police Chief Shawn Denning, we find this:
“City officials have indicated inquiries about the [police] department must be in the form of a Right-to-Know request.”
That is, and right off the bat, a government entity is clamming up about an embarrassing situation and even answers to the simplest request can be delayed anywhere from 30 to 60 days.
While we clearly understand the legal strictures involved – primarily deferring comment on an active criminal investigation – such a blanket blackout serves no useful purpose, is an affront to the transparency so necessary to the execution of sound public policy and, quite frankly, raises red flags that government is attempting to hide something or some things from the public.
And such behavior among public agencies has become the norm rather than the exception. In too many cases, government’s default position is to immediately tell the public that it must file a Right-to-Know request.
Who knows how much of the public’s time and money is wasted by such automatic defensive posturing. We can only wonder if we’ll soon come to this point in calling a government agency:
“Hi, this is Colin McNickle, from the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy. How are you today?”
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to file a Right-to-Know request.”
Do not mistake our critique for something more than it is. Right-to-Know has done much good to force accountability on those public officials who perversely believe that your right to know is their right to hide.
But what has become the near-automatic invoking of “You’ll need to file a Right-to-Know request” must stop. And that’s no matter what their publicly funded attorneys say otherwise.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
