A Pennsylvania appeals court has reversed a lower court’s decision on whether incident locations are part of “time response logs,” and has ordered York County to release cross-streets or addresses in response to a request from a newspaper reporter for response time information. The court’s decision hung on the county’s dependence on a National Emergency Number Association (NENA) definition of “time response log,” and the state legislature’s intent when it passed a Right to Know Law (RtKL) in 2008. The state was among the first to strictly limit release of information from 911 comm centers, including logging tapes of calls, names, addresses and other personal information, both to provide privacy for crime victims and witnesses, but also to stem growing identify theft incidents. Shortly after the RtKL was signed by the governor, a reporter for The York Daily Record asked the county for three months of response time information to help determine the efficiency of emergency responses. However, 911 director Cindy Dietz invoked the state law to keep incident locations private, but did release incident times—call received, dispatched, unit enroute, arrived, unit available. The newspaper appealed and a Common Pleas court agreed that the nationally-accepted definition of “time response log” did not include locations. However, now the three-judge appeals panel has overturned that decision, saying NENA’s post-legislative definition does not take the place of the law’s original intent. In fact, the court noted that NENA’s own “Master Glossary of 9-1-1 Terminology” does not define the term.
On the issue of a definition of the term “time response log,” York Couty told the appeals court that the Pennsylvania chapter of NENA defined the phrase without including addresses or cross-streets. However, the newspaper argued that the NENA chapter, “merely provides an outside agency’s alleged definition of the term, not how the agency at issue actually defines the term and maintains its own records.”
The appeals court agree with the newspaper’s argument on defining the phrase. The court explained that even though Director Dietz had obtained a NENA definition of the phrase, “What someone told another does not establish an industry standard; it is only the response to the question asked by a person who wants a particular response and is not evidence.”
The court stated, “If there is a national standard, evidence should have been included in the record indicating that such a standard has been adopted by PA NENA or NENA, the national organization of which PA NENA is a subchapter.” NENA created a glossary of terms, the court noted, but “time response logs” was not among the “hundreds of terms defined in this glossary.”
The appeals court then analyzed the 2007 legislative debate and record for the Right to Know Law, and found that the phrase “time response log” appeared in the final law without any explanation or definition. In fact, the legislature realized this during the final stages of the bill’s passage, but took no action to amend the law to include a definition. During debate, legislators were even surprised to see the phrase in the final bill, and could not identify which member has written or inserted it into the bill.
The court pointed out that a Right to Know Law is actually expansive, increasing public access to government records. The court concluded, “The General Assembly’s object in requiring access to ‘time response logs’ was to allow the citizenry ‘to scrutinize the actions of public officials’ by evaluating the efficiency of each county’s emergency response to various 911 calls.”
The continued, “In order to be able to conduct such an evaluation or, for that matter, emergency responders to monitor their own performance, time response logs must contain the time of the request for service, the address or cross-street information, and when the responder arrived at the scene. Without the address or cross-street information, there would be no way of knowing exactly how far the emergency responders had to travel in response to any given call and, therefore, no way of determining whether or not those response times were deficient.”
The county admitted to the court that it maintains destination addresses or at least cross-street information as part of the data it receives from 911 emergency calls. “Requester agrees that if cross-street information was provided, that would be a sufficient response to his request,” the court noted.
“Accordingly, the order of the trial court is reversed, and the County is directed to make available to Requester its time response logs in the same manner in which it maintains these records, with the proviso that it can substitute cross-street addresses for destination addresses.”
Download (pdf) the entire appeals court’s decision.
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