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February 13-19, 2003 city beat Right to Know
Ed Goppelt is suing City Hall to get access to info that's rightfully his -- and ours, too. Two years ago, out of "frustration with obtaining reliable information" about city government, Ed Goppelt created the website www.hallwatch.org, a useful source of data both important (polling locations) and arcane (city officials' birthdays). Apparently, his frustration is alive and well. Goppelt recently brought four lawsuits against city agencies, demanding that public information be provided to him at a reasonable cost for posting on his site. If he wins, all Pennsylvanians could gain easier access to public data. Two of Goppelt's suits -- one against the Department of Records and one against the Department of Revenue -- have been filed under Pennsylvania's updated right-to-know act. The decades-old law, which was strengthened in December, sets strict deadlines for the government to respond to requests for documents, limits the fees it can charge and requires that electronic data be turned over in computer files, not reams of paper. Either of Goppelt's suits under this act, if successful, would set a precedent for how open the government must be to public requests for information. Goppelt's case against the revenue department seeks a list of properties whose owners are delinquent in their real estate tax payments. His suit against Records (one of two he is filing against the department) is over his request for a monthly CD-ROM of recent real estate transactions. According to this suit, Records informed him that they could only provide the data on magnetic tape (a storage method from the Tron era), and that the department would charge a fee of $400 per month for the tape reels. The records department is "trying to charge me these huge fees," Goppelt says. "I've done my own investigation of the costs and I determined it would cost $1.74 to create a CD on a monthly basis." Goppelt's calculation added the cost of a blank CD, 14 cents, to the cost of three minutes of staff time, $1.60. According to Goppelt, the process of burning a CD takes about three minutes. In the second suit against the records department, he is asking to view the financial disclosure forms filed by public officials. Goppelt contends that some officials fail to file the required form, seemingly without repercussions. Finally, Goppelt is suing the Board of Revision of Taxes (BRT). He seeks access to the software used by the department to calculate its controversial real estate tax assessments. Neither the financial disclosure suit nor the BRT software case is being filed under the right-to-know law. Joan Decker, the commissioner of the Records Department, would not comment on Goppelt's suits, citing the pending litigation. "Once this is in some kind of a legal issue, we really don't comment on it," she says. Goppelt explains the rationale behind his lawsuits on the website, which he runs out of his South Philly rowhouse. "Good government depends on open records. If the public can't see what kind of job their officials are doing, officials have no incentive to do a good job." The tall, bespectacled webmaster concedes that the records are available for those willing to wait in line at Broad and Market on weekdays, but says, "It's a huge pain in the ass to go down to City Hall and look [records] up." Especially when they could be posted on the Web for perusal at a citizen's convenience. Michael Churchill, chief counsel at the Public Interest Law Center, which is representing Goppelt in his suits against Revenue and Records, says the lawsuits are about more than mere convenience. "What is at stake in Ed's litigation is whether we're really going to have an effective ability to disseminate public documents or whether officials are going to keep this under their own control by making it infeasible to obtain the documents." If Goppelt is successful, Churchill is confident the city government will be more open with its records. If departmental behavior doesn't change, he says, "the courts could find that they were acting in bad faith and hit them in the next suit quite hard." Still, Churchill admits, if government agencies found another way to get around the spirit of the right-to-know act, another full-blown lawsuit might be needed. "There's not much that stops the ingenuity of man in this regard," he laments. And Churchill should know. More than 25 years ago, as a young attorney at the Public Interest Law Center, he sued the city to get a list of tax-delinquent properties. "It's discouraging to see these problems keep recurring," he says, "but it's exciting to see people like Ed [who] have found creative, new ways to disseminate public information and get people involved." (brook@citypaper.net) 
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