Street Safety in Society Hill / getting emails with different redactions from two different agencies
Here is a blog I meant to post almost a year ago. Life got in the way! But it’s nice that this blog is a hobby that isn’t really time sensitive. Here’s the blog now!
This blog post is about some guy complaining about street safety improvements in Queen Village. Basically what happened is: the City moved some “no stopping” signs and added flex posts to improve corner clearances near an elementary school, so that kids could cross the street more safely. Then literally one random guy flipped out and started contacting CM Squilla’s office to complain. The guy seems like a real drama queen:
Even though this was just one guy complaining, CM Squilla contacted the streets department and PPA and they looked into it and made some adjustments! I did a RTKL request about this. The City produced responsive e-mails, including some between City employees and the PPA. But what the City gave me had a lot of redactions. Instead of filing an appeal to the OOR, however, I just did basically the same request to the PPA to see if they would also redact. They did not! On the right, below, is what the City gave me, and on the left is the unredacted version of what the PPA produced.
The point of this blog post is twofold:
1) The Open Records Officer responding to a RTKL request is a human who makes their own judgment calls. Some are more zealous with their redactions. You can challenge this via appeal, BUT if the emails include people from a different agency subject to the RTKL, it could be worth it to try to get them to produce it and see if their Open Records Officer treats it differently.
2) Complaining can apparently get stuff done. I love to complain to my elected officials, but I have had less luck. I send photos of cars parked in the bike lane at 38th and Spruce to CM Gauthier’s office pretty frequently when I commute that way, as an ongoing plea for them to get the Streets Dept to do something (this block is a heavily used commuting route! it’s insane that they just put up some crappy flex posts for like 20’ and called it “solved” and let cars drive over the flex posts). No solution yet, but I will keep complaining! This Craig guy is the worst but also an inspiration in some way.
Here are the two document productions side by side (PPA on the left, with basically no redactions, and the City’s on the right: