STATE COLLEGE — The state’s highest court has denied Penn State’s request to overturn a ruling that will give Spotlight PA and the public access to long-sought trustee documents.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Tuesday denied “a petition for allowance of appeal” from Penn State and the state Department of Education. The requests came after a Commonwealth Court ruling in October that sided with Spotlight PA — as well as affirmed a 2023 determination made by the state’s Office of Open Records — and ordered the university to turn over documents related to a private trustees retreat and a nonpublic board committee meeting, which both happened in 2022.
Penn State was also ordered to unredact portions of a 2022 document given to trustees about the university’s “fiscal challenges” and altering the budget to better align with Penn State’s “priorities and values.”
“We are glad to see that Spotlight PA and the public’s right of access to these clearly public records has been vindicated by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s rejection of the attempt to appeal the Commonwealth Court’s well-reasoned decision,” Heather Murray, associate director of Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic, said in a statement.
The First Amendment Clinic and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press represented Spotlight PA pro bono in the case.
Neither Penn State nor the Department of Education returned requests for comment for this story.
In May 2023, Spotlight PA filed public records requests with Pennsylvania’s agriculture and education departments for records the agencies’ secretaries received while serving on the Penn State Board of Trustees. While Penn State is largely exempt from the state’s open records law due to its special status as a state-related institution, a 2013 court ruling said records that the agencies’ secretaries received as trustees could be accessed.
The Office of Open Records ruled that some of the records the newsroom requested should be made public. Penn State and the Department of Education appealed the decision to Commonwealth Court.
In legal filings and in court in the fall, Penn State argued the state agencies did not possess or control the records Spotlight PA sought because Penn State housed the files on a cloud-based, file-sharing service called Diligent. The online system allows the university to control who can access which files and whether the records can be downloaded.
Commonwealth Court wrote in its decision that the university’s argument was “without merit.”
In its petition to the state Supreme Court, Penn State said Commonwealth Court incorrectly determined that the agency secretaries received the records and therefore could provide them to the newsroom. The education department, in its filing, said the decision ignores the intent of, and improperly expands, Pennsylvania’s open records law.
“As the Commonwealth Court recognized, accepting Penn State’s and the Department of Education’s arguments for withholding here would have perversely incentivized agencies and affected third parties like Penn State to move their records onto cloud-based servers to avoid complying with the Right to Know Law,” said Murray, who is also the managing attorney for the Local Journalism Project. “That would severely undermine the RTKL’s purpose of ensuring government agencies are transparent and accountable to the people. We look forward to Spotlight PA promptly receiving the records that the news outlet requested nearly three years ago.”