Pennsylvania's Sunshine Act, which governs how meetings may be held, may be the most demanding of the state's local government accountability laws.

But, media advocates say, it also suffers a critical flaw: The Sunshine Act is difficult, if not impossible, to enforce.

On Tuesday, the Butler Eagle reported that Lancaster Township supervisors held more than a dozen meetings outside the bounds of the Sunshine Act. The township has since pledged to make a greater effort to comply with the law.

Melissa Melewsky, an attorney with the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, said that while the Office of Open Records is responsible for training entities on the Sunshine Act, it does not have the authority to enforce it.

In fact, no entity has that authority.

“There's no government agency that polices Sunshine Act compliance,” Melewsky said. “It is a citizen-enforced law, so we the people are responsible for agency compliance.”

That's a stark contrast from another government accountability statute, the Right-to-Know Law. The Office of Open Records hears appeals of denials of requests under that law and acts as a quasi-judicial tribunal in deciding whether the agencies must provide documents following the appealed denials.

It doesn't do so with the Sunshine Act. That then leaves to residents the enforcement of the Sunshine Act, Melewsky said, which can only be pursued in local courts in one of two ways. But private enforcement of the law is difficult.

If a resident believes members of a local entity intentionally violated the Sunshine Act, they can file a private criminal complaint. Following that, the county district attorney would determine whether to follow on that with criminal charges.Melewsky said she has, on a handful of occasions, heard of district attorneys sending board or council members a warning letter, but she hasn't heard of charges being filed with respect to the Sunshine Act.In fact, she added, she knows several occasions on which district attorneys have told those who have filed private complaints to take it to the magistrate themselves if they wanted charges to be held over.Butler County has seen at least one instance in which a municipal resident filed a private criminal complaint because of the Sunshine Act. In Butler, then-mayor Tom Donaldson filed such a complaint in 2017 over allegations that city council held executive sessions without later disclosing them to the public.No charges came from that complaint, however. Melewsky said instances like that show the failures of the open meetings law.

The second manner by which residents can enforce the Sunshine Act is filing a civil action against the municipality, rather than the individual members, in the county Court of Common Pleas. That's another way the Sunshine Act falls short, Melewsky said.“Obviously, one would need the means and wherewithal to pursue a lawsuit,” she said. “Not many folks have a few thousand dollars lying around to pursue a Sunshine Act violation.”Even then, the enforcement is limited.Melewsky said courts typically treat the cases as curative — that is, they tell the agency to remedy their past failures by taking official actions in public that had been shrouded by secrecy or by alerting residents of previously undisclosed executive meetings.Very rarely, Melewsky said, will a court throw out the official action of an agency or issue fines because of failures under the Sunshine Act. And because of that, she argued, agencies frequently disregard it without ramification.“It's difficult for the public to enforce this law, and agencies know that,” Melewsky said. “It's not a secret. One of the biggest problems with the Sunshine Act is not the Sunshine Act itself. The biggest problem with the Sunshine Act is it can be ignored with impunity.”