State Rep. Babette Josephs, D-Philadelphia, labeled as "paternalistic" the state Department of Transportation's refusal to release numerical inspection scores for 54 steel deck truss bridges in Pennsylvania — the same design used for the Minneapolis Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed last week.

She accused the Pennsylvania transportation agency of being fearful that the numbers might cause undue concern among a motoring public that wouldn't fully understand their meaning.

To hers and Gov. Ed Rendell's credit, that data won't remain a secret. State Secretary of Transportation Allen D. Biehler announced Tuesday that the information, in a user-friendly format, will be made available as soon as possible online.

However, he said the information would take some time to assemble because officials who must work on that effort currently are focused on managing the re-inspection of the 54 steel deck truss bridges, as directed by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

There was some speculation that there was more to the initial Penn-DOT refusal than the potential for public misunderstanding. It was speculated that perhaps PennDOT was fearful of how the specifics of that data might someday be the basis for litigation, if the information became public knowledge and if some tragedy were to occur.

It isn't out of the question that lawsuits could originate from the Minneapolis tragedy. In the weeks and months ahead, all that Minnesota transportation officials knew about the condition of the I-35W span prior to its collapse will be thoroughly dissected by investigators.

Such would be the case if one of Pennsylvania's bridges were to give way. The numerical inspection scores — and what PennDOT did or did not do in response to inspection findings — would be important information that investigators would seek to collect.

Besides criticizing PennDOT's past refusals to release the information, Josephs made good points about the public's basic right to know.

"Where does PennDOT get the legal authority to decide that the public cannot handle certain types of information?" she wrote in a letter to Biehler. "PennDOT is not the 'daddy' to make these paternalistic, unilateral decisions; it is the servant that works for the citizens."

She rightly stressed that there should be no secrecy regarding publicly financed studies, reports, rankings and documents.

The bridge inspections in question result in ratings numbers from 0 to 9, with 0 meaning very poor condition and 9 meaning excellent.

A PennDOT spokesman told a Pittsburgh newspaper that those "bridge sufficiency numbers" are used by the agency's engineers to monitor the condition of the spans.

PennDOT says a bridge labeled "structurally deficient" needs costly repairs or total replacement to bring it up to current bridge standards, but it still is deemed safe.

Despite identified problems of the Minnesota bridge prior to its collapse, transportation officials in that state regarded the span as posing no immediate danger.

They were wrong.

In criticizing PennDOT, Josephs said she wanted to reverse Pennsylvania state government's presumption that most records are closed to the public unless it is successfully argued that they should be open. PennDOT's stance that the requested sufficiency ratings were "internal documents" was the argument that kept the ratings and documents beyond the public's reach.

Critics of the state's open-records law say the statute is weak because it gives officials at all levels of government wide latitude to deny public records requests, as exemplified by the initial refusal to release the bridge safety data.

PennDOT didn't improve its standing with the public by continuing to maintain such a stance in the wake of the Minnesota tragedy although the public should feel more at ease, now that the issue has been resolved.

States across the nation are reinspecting bridges in a predictable reaction to the Minneapolis collapse. A similar reaction in this state occurred following the Dec. 27, 2005, collapse of a bridge over Interstate 70 in Washington County.

Those subsequent inspections resulted in the rebuilding of the Route 8 bridge over Route 422 in the Bon Aire area of Butler Township last year.

Biehler said after last week's incident in Minnesota that the commonwealth currently has 5,900 bridges of various construction types that are regarded as structurally deficient.

But in Tuesday's news release he stressed, "A low rating does not mean a bridge is unsafe. If there were any unsafe conditions, the bridges would be closed."

Rendell obviously was the key to PennDOT's decision to release the information in question, thus defusing the data controversy. The Penn-DOT release quoted Biehler as saying, "Gov. Rendell is committed to assuring the public that the safety of the state's 25,000 bridges is not in question and, after consultation with the governor's chief of staff, I have directed our staff to work on making condition ratings available."

Biehler said when it is compiled, the information will be available in a non-technical format and be placed on PennDOT's Web site, www.dot.state.pa.us, where other bridge information already is available.

Josephs deserves praise for her pursuit of her open-bridge-records objective. More lawmakers should have been visibly active in that effort.