The arguments made by those defending the right of Pennsylvania's student loan agency to keep its spending records secret only serve to heighten public suspicions. And the longer the legal wrangling over the disputed documents continues, the more the public will wonder what the agency is hiding.

The ongoing legal battle between the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) and several news organizations has gone before a Commonwealth Court panel, which will decide whether some 30,000 pages of records will be made public under the state's Right-to-Know Law.

The current dispute was sparked by earlier news reports of the board's spending on travel and conferences at luxury resorts. It has been widely reported that the PHEAA board has spent more than $884,000 since 2000 on trips to California's Napa Valley, Maryland's Eastern Shore and locations in West Virginia and Virginia.

In 2005, a three-day board gathering at Nemacolin Woodlands, a luxury resort in Fayette County, rang up a tab of $136,000.

Pointing to the potential cost of making thousands of pages of records public, William Lamb, a PHEAA lawyer, said, "If we have to go through this process, we're taking money out of kids' pockets to do it."

In light of the questionable travel spending by the agency's board, this defense is laughable.

If PHEAA is so concerned about committing every dollar available to student loans, it would have opted to hold meetings closer to Harrisburg and at locations less costly than Napa Valley or Nemacolin Woodlands.

Public sensitivity to expenditures by public officials has been heightened ever since the controversial pay-raise vote by state lawmakers on July 7, 2005.

The voter outrage that was triggered by the stealthy 2 a.m. pay-raise vote and the subsequent use of unvouchered expenses to grab the higher pay immediately, rather than wait until after the next election, as is mandated by the state constitution, further angered voters.

The pay-grab controversy has sparked a reform movement to make state government more transparent and more accountable.

So, PHEAA is on shaky ground when it tries to defend — or hide evidence of — questionable spending. More and more voters are fed up with secrecy in state government, and public sentiment continues to build for more openness, not less — especially when it involves possibly frivolous spending.

Lamb, a former state Supreme Court justice, is unlikely to sway public opinion when he argues that making the requested documents public will consume precious funds better directed toward student loans.

Another argument used by PHEAA to keep its records secret is that the agency should be exempt from the state's Right-to-Know Law because it has 16 state lawmakers on its 20-member board.

Most observers of the behind-closed-doors dealings in Harrisburg would view the dominance of state lawmakers on the loan agency's board as all the more reason to reject the current stance of hiding spending records from public view.

Most Pennsylvanians would agree with retired Dauphin County Judge Warren Morgan, who sided with reporters and the media in May, saying PHEAA is a "public corporation and governmental instrumentality (whose) earnings are public moneys."

Finally, the arguments by PHEAAofficials that the requested documents would reveal "trade secrets" seems an absurd stretch. Alawyer for the journalists involved in the lawsuit was correct when he said, "This is about 'how many rounds of golf we played at Nemacolin.' I fail to see how this is a trade secret."

It's hard to see how this continuing legal battle is anything more than an attempt by PHEAAto avoid further embarrassment over questionable board spending. With its legal tactics, the agency has only made its predicament worse and increased public interest in its spending practices.