I am one of the strongest advocates of the Pennsylvania Right to Know Law and the Office of Open Records, having created that agency, its policies and procedures, and all from a cubicle and armed only with a copy of the law. From those meager beginnings in 2008, the OOR has burgeoned into a 22-person, $2 million budget office, now under the stewardship of its third executive director. The OOR, whose appeals officers have a higher workload than a Philadelphia assistant district attorney, does a remarkable job independently arbitrating whether a record of a government agency is public. Most of the time, I agree with the office’s legal conclusions.

Despite my respect for OOR, it made a huge mistake last month, with implications far beyond whether records are public. The OOR held that the Pennsylvania opioid misuse and addiction abatement trust is not subject to the records-access law and that it did not have jurisdiction over the entity. The trust will oversee and receive funds from settlements entered into by the Office of Attorney General and opioid manufacturers, distributors and pharmacy chains. The trust, created by an order of the Commonwealth Court on July 12, 2022, is governed by a board of trustees that distributes those settlement funds to the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, counties, and subdivisions for their use exclusively to abate the opioid crisis in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania counties and other governmental subsidiaries are slated to receive $1.8 billion over an 18-year period. In the first year alone, Pennsylvania received $148 million. Payouts to state and local governments came from drug distributors McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen, and manufacturer Johnson & Johnson.