Unopen to all
Another perversion of the open-records law
The refusal by Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald to release the city’s bid for Amazon’s second headquarters shows how little regard officials have for the public’s right to know — and how easily the open-records law can be manipulated by government agencies preferring to operate in secret.
Mr. Peduto and Mr. Fitzgerald have declined to turn over copies of the bid partly because they don’t want other cities to know what the city and county offered Amazon in incentives to locate its HQ2 here. Their argument is that secrecy begets competitiveness.
Other legal shortcuts also could help the government be more efficient. For example, the police might solve more crimes without the Fourth Amendment’s pesky prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure. Should the Fourth Amendment be dismissed as blithely as the openrecords statute? Public officials have to operate within the law, even if they find it distasteful or a hindrance. That’s the job they signed up to do.
In all, 238 cities and regions submitted proposals to host HQ2, which could create as many as 50,000 jobs. Some applicants have released their bids, but most have not.
On Tuesday, Mr. Peduto and Mr. Fitzgerald issued a statement reminding the media that they had said as far back as October that they wouldn’t release their Amazon bid. If they made their decision in October, the open-records process that followed was a mockery from the start.
When a request for records is filed by the media or any member of the public, lawyers at the city or county are supposed to review it and grant or deny access based on a fair interpretation of the law. In the case of the Amazon bid, the lawyers’ job evidently was to dream up a justification for a decision their bosses already had made. This is a common perversion of the open-records law by municipalities and school districts statewide.
In denying news organizations copies of the Amazon bid, city and county lawyers can’t cite the section of the law that exempts the release of information to protect a government’s economic competitiveness. That’s because no such section exists; the open-records law does not permit documents to be withheld for the reason Mr. Peduto and Mr. Fitzgerald repeatedly have given for keeping the city’s Amazon bid under wraps.
Instead, the lawyers have been stretching other language to the breaking point to serve their bosses’ desire for secrecy. For example, the county told the news outlet PublicSource that it couldn’t release the bid partly because it contained trade secrets and proprietary information.
While the open-records law permits documents to be withheld for those reasons, it’s laughable to think the exemption applies in this case. The city and county have no trade secrets, and it’s unlikely a savvy, hyper-competitive company like Amazon would divulge sensitive material to the hundreds of politicians and thousands of government employees and consultants across the country working to prepare bids for the HQ2 project.
The city and county have resorted to other open-records shenanigans, too, such as invoking 30day extensions to address requests when they should be responding within the initial five-day window outlined in the law. Extensions are to be used for legitimate purposes, such as searching for documents someone has requested. There’s no need to search for the Amazon bid. It’s evidently under lock and key. Misuse of the extension privilege is just another way for public officials to thumb their noses at the openrecords law, which was intended to improve, not hamper, access to records.
Some news organizations turned down by the city and county have filed appeals with the state Office of Open Records, hoping for a more credible review of their records requests. In the end, the city and county may hope just to stave off public disclosure of the Amazon bid for as long as possible. That’s another common perversion of the open-records law.