The Commonwealth Court held that a satellite installer was J&S’s employee, Dish Network was his statutory employer, and an insurance certificate did not establish coverage.
The Commonwealth Court held that personal care homes may appeal the fact of a regulatory violation even after correction and before DHS takes action against the facility’s license.
The Commonwealth Court held that Wayne County could not apply Pennsylvania’s charitable-exemption tests parcel by parcel to the Salvation Army’s integrated 1,200-acre camp and retreat facility.
The Commonwealth Court held that an order striking a consent order and reopening a property-assessment case is not final or immediately appealable.
The Commonwealth Court reversed the Office of Open Records and held that Pennsylvania Lottery ticket VIRN numbers (Validation Information Record Numbers) are trade secrets exempt from Right-to-Know Law disclosure under Section 708(b)(11), even though individual numbers are revealed to winning ticket holders at the time of claiming a prize. The court reasoned that compiling thousands of claimed VIRN numbers produces a recognizable pattern from which Scientific Games’ proprietary validation algorithm could be reconstructed — making the aggregated dataset a trade secret that ‘reveals’ the algorithm even if isolated numbers do not.
The Commonwealth Court reversed a Bureau of Hearings and Appeals order that had required a specific judicial finding of ‘child abuse’ before a guilty plea could support a founded ChildLine report, holding that factual identity between the plea and the report — not a separate court-issued label — is the operative standard under the CPSL.
The Commonwealth Court, sitting en banc, affirmed zoning variances for a 190-foot Verizon cell tower in Upper Macungie Township but adopted a new post-Loper Bright framework: carriers must first attempt to satisfy the MPC’s property-specific hardship requirements, then—if unmet—seek TCA-based relief under the two-part APT Pittsburgh coverage-gap-and-least-intrusive-means test, rejecting the Third Circuit’s FCC-derived “materially inhibit” standard. President Judge Cohn Jubelirer concurred in the result but vigorously disputed the majority’s analytical approach.
The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the dismissal of a Right-to-Know Law appeal from an OAG denial, holding that the Office of Open Records has no jurisdiction over such appeals because Section 503(d)(1) of the RTKL expressly requires the Attorney General to designate its own appeals officer, a jurisdictional carve-out analogous to the one applicable to judicial agencies.
The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania affirmed a $14,000 civil penalty and three-year suspension of lead abatement licenses for Howland Company and its owner, holding that the Bureau of Occupational and Industrial Safety need not introduce written risk assessment reports or prove actual lead presence to establish violations of the Lead Certification Act, and that 14 violations across five job sites over 16 months—despite prior Bureau warnings—supported the suspension term.
The Commonwealth Court affirmed the PLRB’s dismissal of a nonprofit’s report of alleged illegal PSEA political contributions as untimely, holding that PERA’s four-month statute of limitations in Section 1505 applies to Section 1701 reports of union political-contribution violations—not only to traditional unfair practice charges—because the Board’s own regulation treats such reports as “charges” subject to the Board’s investigatory framework established in Trometter.
The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania reversed a trial court’s denial of summary judgment and restored full governmental immunity to the Borough of Prospect Park, holding that an 11-foot-wide paved park pathway that dead-ends past a pavilion is not a “street” under the Political Subdivision Tort Claims Act’s Streets Exception—and that the Sidewalk Exception therefore also fails because there is no qualifying street to adjoin.
The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania held that the 2020 amendment changing mandatory parole review for rape convicts from annual to triennial (61 Pa.C.S. § 6139(a)(3.3)) does not violate the ex post facto clause, because it alters only when the Board must conduct review—not the standards for granting parole or the Board’s authority to act on its own motion sooner.
The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania vacated a Beaver County trial court’s denial of a real estate tax exemption for a land conservation trust, holding that the trial court misapplied the HUP purely-public-charity test by merging the “charitable purpose” and “indefinite public benefit” factors, improperly requiring evidence of significant public visitation, and ignoring the Environmental Rights Amendment and the Charitable Purposes Act in the charitable-purpose analysis.
The Commonwealth Court held that Pennsylvania’s Real Estate Tax Sale Law exceptions procedure does not permit constitutional challenges to the validity of a tax levy, affirming dismissal of a pro se taxpayer’s Uniformity Clause attack on Delaware County school taxes as beyond the scope of the RETSL exceptions process.
The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, sitting en banc, upheld Luzerne County’s $10,100 fee for bulk CAMA property assessment data, holding that Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law permits market-value-based fees for complex data sets — not merely the cost of duplication — and that coordinating pricing information across counties does not constitute bad faith.
The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania reversed the denial of a license suspension appeal, holding that Court Administration’s ten-year failure to schedule a hearing — despite repeated court orders to do so — constituted an extraordinary government-caused delay that violated the licensee’s due process rights under the Middaugh framework and mandated dismissal of the suspension.