State Grants Appeal In Response Time Request

The Pennsylvania Office of Open Records (OOR) has ordered York County’s 911 center to include locations in any citizen requests for response time logs, after a citizen appealed the county’s refusal to provide such information, claiming it was confidential under state law. The state’s Right to Know Law specifically prohibits the release of telephone and radio logging tapes, limiting information only to what the legislature called “time response logs.” The issue on appeal before the OOR was whether incident locations are considered part of the “time response log” record. In an opinion released last week, the OOR agreed with the citizen who appealed the county’s decision, saying that without a location, response time logs are useless in determining if emergency units are arriving in a timely fashion. Therefore, the OOR said that locations must be part of the time response logs that comm centers are required to release. The county is considering an appeal of the OOR’s decision. Download (pdf) the entire OOR decision here, and note the use of a NENA definition that does not include an incident location.