Background
Eric Epstein and Rock the Capital submitted two multi-part requests to Commonwealth Charter Academy Charter School under Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law, or RTKL. The requests sought categories of records concerning school operations and identified subjects, time periods, and types of documents. The school denied portions as insufficiently specific and characterized the overall effort as a series of fishing expeditions that would consume substantial staff time and public resources.
The Office of Open Records granted the requesters partial relief and ordered production of several categories. The Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas rejected the school’s appeals. Commonwealth Charter Academy then asked the Commonwealth Court to treat the cumulative volume and burden as a reason to deny access, while challenging the specificity of particular items. The requesters sought appellate attorney fees and pointed to the school’s conduct in other open-records matters.
The dispute required application of the RTKL’s familiar specificity test: a request should identify the transaction or activity involved, define the scope of documents sought, and provide a finite time frame. Those factors interact; no single formulation or keyword controls when the request as a whole gives the agency enough information to conduct a search.
The Court’s Holding
Judge Fizzano Cannon wrote that the disputed items were sufficiently specific. A request need not identify the precise record or use an agency’s preferred terminology if its subject, scope, and time limits permit a targeted search. The court upheld the Office of Open Records’ item-by-item analysis and the trial court’s production orders.
The panel rejected a free-standing burden or volume defense. Commonwealth Charter Academy cited no authority permitting an agency to deny otherwise valid requests simply because fulfilling them would require substantial staff time or expense. Pennsylvania cases that reject broad demands do so because the particular request fails the specificity elements—for example, because its subject is vague, its time period unlimited, or it requires legal research—not because a court totals multiple requests and decides the requester has asked for too much.
The court declined to create a nebulous cumulative standard that would require tribunals to tally disputed and undisputed requests against agency resources. It affirmed the orders compelling disclosure. The panel separately denied attorney fees because the requesters had not sought them and developed bad-faith facts in the trial court or filed a cross-appeal. Alleged misconduct in a different Office of Open Records case could not replace a record and findings in these appeals.
Key Takeaways
- RTKL specificity depends on the request’s subject matter, document scope, and time frame considered together.
- An agency cannot deny an otherwise specific request solely because production is burdensome or costly.
- Courts will assess each request on its own terms rather than impose an undefined cumulative-volume limit.
- A requester seeking attorney fees should raise bad faith in the trial court, create a factual record, and cross-appeal if relief is denied.
Why It Matters
This decision is particularly important for Pennsylvania agencies and frequent open-records requesters. Administrative inconvenience is not itself a statutory exemption. Agencies should document genuine specificity defects, communicate about narrowing where practical, and separate the legal validity of a request from the operational effort required to answer it.
Requesters still benefit from drafting around the three specificity dimensions. Identifying the activity, document types, and a bounded period makes it harder to characterize a request as exploratory. The attorney-fee ruling supplies a parallel procedural lesson: bad faith is fact-intensive and cannot first be litigated in an appellee’s brief. Even strong concerns about an agency’s history require preservation, evidence, findings, and the correct appellate vehicle.
Agencies facing large productions retain practical tools even without a categorical burden defense. They can seek clarification, propose rolling production, identify responsive databases and custodians, and invoke applicable exemptions with the evidence the RTKL requires. What they cannot do is replace the statute’s specificity inquiry with a generalized complaint about staff workload. Requesters, in turn, can reduce delay and litigation expense by prioritizing categories and stating whether they seek emails, contracts, board materials, or another defined record class. A well-documented cooperative process may narrow disputes while preserving the agency’s ability to defend any genuinely vague item. It can also give the reviewing tribunal a concrete record of what the search actually entails.