Pennsylvanians have a strong interest in government transparency. The problem is that the Corbett administration apparently doesn’t think so. If it did, lawyers representing the state would not have been in Commonwealth Court Tuesday to defend the indefensible.
The commonwealth’s lawyers were there to speak on behalf of what amounts to a mockery of the state Right-to-Know law — a policy that encourages public employees nightly to prune the number of emails they keep. The deleted emails are backed up by state servers for just five days before being permanently purged — thus excluding any legal review.
This newspaper and others have sued, asking that the court stop the outrageous policy of destroying emails so soon and order that they be preserved for at least two years. On Tuesday, the commonwealth argued that the 2008 Right-to-Know law still gives the state the right to set its own records retention policies.
That is a welcome reminder. Whether it conforms to the letter of the law — and Commonwealth Court must decide that — this is a policy, the result of a conscious decision, one that happens to completely abuse the spirit of the law. The public interest here has been arrogantly trampled by the bureaucratic urge to keep public business under wraps.
That reality is why the Post-Gazette has been joined in its lawsuit by the The Patriot News of Harrisburg; the York Daily Record/Sunday News; the Chambersburg Public Opinion; The (Hanover) Evening Sun; the Lebanon Daily News; and LNP Media Group, parent company of The Intelligencer Journal and Lancaster New Era.
There’s been plenty of news lately about state officials and their emails to underscore the importance of transparency. Wouldn’t it be nice if Mr. Corbett used his power to simply change the policy as a sign to voters in the upcoming election that his administration is enlightened? Instead, its lawyers are deployed in the tawdry cause of keeping the public from knowing.
First Published: October 26, 2014, 4:00 a.m.
