Frustrating
The Pennsylvania State Legislature is a study in frustration. Even when it starts out doing the right thing, it ends up doing the wrong thing.
Consider that recently, by a 46-0 vote, the state Senate approved updates to the seven-year-old Right to Know Law, lifting major exemptions for the state’s three biggest university systems, Penn State, Pitt and Temple.
The changes will require the schools to list the salaries of its officers, directors and top 25 highest-paid employees. They would also have to provide salary ranges for the next 175 highly paid workers and provide other various types of information, including how many undergraduate classes are taught by graduate students versus full-time faculty.
The bill also would allow the state to charge organizations that request records for purely commercial purposes and put limits on records sought by inmates, who are clogging up the system with countless requests for unnecessary information.
All in all, the changes were good and necessary as part of a timely review of the law.
However, the Legislature then turned around and approved an amendment to the law by a 26-23 vote that did the wrong thing by adding state, municipal and school district employees, including teachers, to the list of workers, such as police and judges, whose home addresses are not accessible under the RTK Law.
Senators approving the measure said they were doing so for safety reasons, but the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association said the measure was unnecessary because the statute already provides exemptions for those employees at risk.
Keeping home addresses accessible serves the public interest, the PNA said, by allowing the verification of residency for candidates and some employees. The media also uses it to confirm the identities of subjects they are writing about, which could include those charged with crimes or those being honored by their communities, the PNA added.
“For obvious reasons, it is critical that these individuals are properly identified (and that others are not incorrectly identified),” the PNA noted.
State Sen. Camera Bartolotta voted for the amendment, explaining it protects workers from people who are mentally unstable or have bad intentions.
However, state Sen. Pat Stefano voted against the amendment, noting there are numerous other ways for home addresses to be obtained, and he didn’t see how it would provide additional protection for teachers and others.
Stefano is to be commended for his common sense voting on this issue. Home address information is widely available through private databases, internet search tools and other public records.
So, anyone who truly wants to find someone’s home address can find it, like it or not. All the law does is make it harder for reporters to do their jobs.
The state Legislature, however, still has a chance to get this right. The bill moves to the state House of Representatives, and we hope the members, there, including our local representatives, do the right thing by following Stefano’s lead and voting against the RTK amendment.