Terry Mutchler, head of the state’s open records office, stopped by the YDR’s newsroom this afternoon to talk to the editorial board. Her main message: The office is at a crossroads.
It’s facing a budget cut, she says, and it can’t keep doing the work its doing with the number of staffers it has. What she wants legislators to hear is that it’s time to either fully fund the office — which amounts to giving it an additional $300,000 than what is currently proposed — or decide what functions the office should drop.
Key points in her argument for the 10-person office to be funded at $1.4 million:
- It does customer service, training (mandated by the law), rules on appeals, and goes to court for hearings.
- Five lawyers have handled almost 4,000 appeals. If Penn State and three other state-related universities come under the RTK law, which many anticipate, that could add hundreds more cases.
- The office has had more than 200 cases in Common Pleas, Commonwealth and state Supreme courts.
- 95 percent of appeals are from citizens, and in three years, the office has received about 40,000 calls from citizens asking questions about the law.
- Connecticut’s right to know office has 22 staffers, a $2 million budget and 800 appeals this year. Pennsylvania’s RTK office has handled close to 2,000 appeals this year.
Mutchler thinks the office’s top function, even if its budget is cut, has to be ruling on appeals. If you’re going to say Pennsylvania is going to be transparent and shed its culture of secrecy, she said, “you have to have an independent agency to test that.”
The state, she said, could end up with a better open records law than it had before 2009 but with an office that can’t back it up. “If you don’t put gas in the car, you’re not going anywhere.”
She talked a lot about other RTK issues, and I’ll post more from her talk tomorrow.
