Pennsylvania's Open Records Office didn't enhance the public's right to know indeed, it might have inflicted significant damage to it in ruling against media, therefore public, access in a Northampton School Board budget case.

Besides the issue of the ruling, it also can be asked what the Northampton board was trying to hide by redacting dollar figures from a draft budget under consideration by the board in February.

The board provided a copy of the budget proposal to a reporter for the Allentown Morning Call on the day after a special meeting dealing with the spending plan. However, the budget document had little if any meaning without numbers.

When the reporter appealed the board's stance, the Open Records Office was asked to rule on the board's action. Instead of protecting the public's right to know, the appeals officer, Lucinda Glinn, in siding with the board, provided an explanation that in no way comes down on the side of common sense.

If the public is denied access to proposed budget numbers, how can the public question the judgment behind those numbers before they are approved?

Glinn reasoned that, at the meeting in question, the board didn't reach a decision and could withhold the information under a provision in the state Right-to-Know public records law that exempts documents in "predecisional deliberations."

If Glinn's decision is allowed to stand, it isn't out of the question to believe that more school boards will be using the Northampton tactic in their own budget deliberations to hide what might be controversial spending under consideration.

Again, the looming question is what Northampton was or is trying to hide.

Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, has argued that Northampton's budget figures should have been made public because the "predecisional" exception doesn't apply to a proposal once it is presented to a quorum of board members for deliberation at a public meeting.

Emily Leader, an attorney for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said the Northampton case is a textbook example of the kind of situations lawmakers intended the "predecisional" exemption to cover.

If what Leader says is so, state lawmakers should revisit the Open Records Law at the earliest possible time with the goal of fixing that obvious shortcoming in the law.

School boards and municipal governments should operate with a mind-set dedicated to transparency, not secrecy. The Open Records Office should be a bulwark behind that thinking and, if it's going to err, it ought to do so on the side of openness and public access.

In the Northampton case, the school board should be the one in the position of deciding whether to appeal an Open Records Office ruling against it, rather than the public having to weigh an appeal against a decision that clearly is outside the bounds of the public's best interests and rights.

The Allentown newspaper should exercise whatever appeal options are available in an effort to undo this wrong.

J.R.K.