Troubling
In a 5-2 decision last week, the Commonwealth Court ruled that, under the state’s Right-to-Know Law, Pennsylvania government agencies may not release a person’s home address without informing the individual that it has been requested and giving the individual a chance to challenge its release.
The Commonwealth Court’s ruling on home addresses, handed down in response to a Pennsylvania State Education Association lawsuit, is an assault on our Right-to-Know Law.
By requiring notice be given to anyone whose address appears in a requested public record, as President Judge Dan Pellegrini said in his dissent, the majority opinion “frustrates the purposes of the act and impedes an agency’s ability to provide essential services.”
A good example of such frustration came in 2013, when Simon Campbell, president of Pennsylvanians for Union Reform, filed a Right-to-Know request seeking the names and home addresses of the more than 230,000 members of the State Employees’ Retirement System.
The state Office of Open Records responded by requiring SERS to give its members a chance to appeal the release of their names and addresses.
To comply, SERS contracted with a commercial printing service to contact its members. The cost: $91,662.
That’s a lot of taxpayer dollars. In other cases, it could waste a lot of time.
What if, for example, an agency received a request for a document listing employees and their salaries, and decided, as a result of the Commonwealth Court ruling, to spend time redacting those employees’ addresses?
A simple release of the document — the appropriate response before the ruling — would take a lot less time. And the inclusion of addresses often is important when trying to accurately identify people.
Consider, for example, a request seeking the home address of a “John Smith” or “James Martin” who is seeking or holding a public job with a residency requirement. Without an address, how is anyone supposed to know whether he resides in the legally required place?
And, as Pellegrini noted, home addresses are not and never have been in any practical sense private information.
“Free online services provide home addresses, telephone numbers, a person’s age, who else lives in the house, their ages, pictures of the home address and prior home addresses,” Pellegrini wrote. “… In the not-too-distant past, home addresses were readily discoverable; it was called the White Pages, which had both a person’s home address and telephone number.”
Concerned about individual privacy? So was the General Assembly.
The Right-to-Know Law allows an agency to withhold personal information if its release “would be reasonably likely to result in a substantial and demonstrable risk of physical harm to or the personal security of an individual.”
The court majority’s concern was that the General Assembly included protection of individuals’ private information in the Right-to-Know Law but failed to provide a mechanism for individuals to defend that information from requests for it.
Instances of a home address release threatening an individual with physical harm or a loss of personal security are rare. The number of records that could be made public rapidly without any true harm to individuals is comparatively large. As Pellegrini noted, the ruling could apply to, and thus slow the release of, a multitude of public records that often include home addresses and other personal information — building permits, business licenses, public contracts.
This case should be appealed, and the state Supreme Court should reverse the Commonwealth Court to restore the Right-to-Know Law as an effective means of keeping public records open to the public.
– LancasterOnline