PA: Exemptions in State’s Right to Know Law are coextensive with state search and seizure provision

Exemptions under Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Law are at least coextensive with the state’s right to privacy under the constitutional search and seizure provision. Thus, public school teachers’ home addresses should, on balance, remain private and nondisclosable. Pa. State Educ. Ass’n v. Commonwealth Dept. of Comm. & Econ. Dev., 2016 Pa. LEXIS 2337 (Oct. 18, 2016):

Having determined that the public school employees represented here by PSEA continue to have constitutionally protected privacy interests in their home addresses, we must proceed to perform the necessary balancing test. On the one hand, the public school employees have strong privacy interests in protecting their home addresses from disclosure, in response to broad and generic requests based upon no criteria other than their occupation. As PSEA indicates, public school employees just want to work, and should not be required to forfeit their privacy merely as a precondition to, or by virtue of, their decision to be employed as public school employees. Brief of Appellant/PSEA at 45. On the other hand, the OOR has identified no public benefit or interest in disclosure of perhaps tens of thousands of addresses of public school employees. We likewise perceive no public benefit or interest to disclosure in response to such generic requests for irrelevant personal information of these particular public employees who have undertaken the high calling of educating our children. To the contrary, nothing in the RTKL suggests that it was ever intended to be used as a tool to procure personal information about private citizens or, in the worst sense, to be a generator of mailing lists. Public agencies are not clearinghouses of “bulk” personal information otherwise protected by constitutional privacy rights. While the goal of the legislature to make more, rather than less, information available to public scrutiny is laudable, the constitutional rights of the citizens of this Commonwealth to be left alone remains a significant countervailing force.

For these reasons, we conclude that the Commonwealth Court erred in ruling that there is no constitutional right to privacy in one’s home address in connection with RTKL requests. The right to informational privacy is guaranteed by Article 1, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, and may not be violated unless outweighed by a public interest favoring disclosure. As the balancing weighs in favor of the public school employees on the facts and circumstances presented here, the Commonwealth Court’s order granting summary judgment in favor of the OOR on Counts I, II, and III of PSEA’s Amended Petition for Review was in error and must be reversed.

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