Background
Daniel Auerbach asked the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office under Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law (RTKL) for any list of real properties sold at sheriff’s sale from January 1, 2023 forward. The office initially said it had no responsive list. During the ensuing Office of Open Records appeal, however, it produced a document listing sheriff-sale properties.
The Office of Open Records dismissed the appeal as moot, and the court of common pleas agreed. Auerbach maintained that the City had improperly reframed his request and supplied a newly generated, functionally inadequate summary rather than the database he believed existed. He also sought a finding of bad faith and attorney’s fees.
The Court’s Holding
The Commonwealth Court affirmed. Judge Covey focused on the words of the request: Auerbach asked for ‘any list,’ not for a particular database, database fields, or an export in a specified electronic format. The produced record was a list of properties sold at sheriff’s sale during the requested period and therefore answered the request as written.
The RTKL requires agencies to provide existing public records responsive to the language submitted; it does not permit a requester to broaden or revise the request on appeal. Because the supplied list resolved the access dispute, the matter was moot. The court also declined to find bad faith. It had neither reversed the final determination nor ordered access to additional records, leaving no statutory basis for an attorney-fee award.
Key Takeaways
- RTKL disputes turn on the request’s actual wording, and “any list” may be satisfied by one responsive list.
- A requester generally cannot transform a request for a list into a demand for an underlying database during an appeal.
- Bad-faith and fee claims weaken when the agency ultimately supplies a record that satisfies the request as drafted.
Why It Matters
For Pennsylvania open-records practitioners, the opinion is a drafting lesson. A requester who needs row-level data, identified fields, metadata, or a native database export should say so precisely and should identify the desired record rather than describe only the information sought.
Agencies should not read the case as permission to evade clear database requests by creating summaries. The result depended on unusually broad language—‘any list’—and the court’s conclusion that the produced record matched it. Specific requests will require a correspondingly specific response.