City of Harrisburg v. Prince (majority)
Annotate this CaseIn February 2015, Appellant Joshua Prince (“Prince”) submitted a Right to Know Law (RTKL) request to the City of Harrisburg seeking records related to the Protect Harrisburg Legal Defense Fund (the “Fund”), which the City created to defray legal costs associated with defending challenges to local firearms ordinances. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court granted allocatur to decide whether a spreadsheet created by the City to show the receipt of funds from donors to the Fund constituted a financial record as defined in the RTKL. The Supreme Court found that although records that would disclose the identity of individual donors were generally exempted from disclosure under the RTKL, if those records could be characterized as financial records, public access was statutorily required. The Court concluded the Commonwealth Court erred in concluding that the donor spreadsheet was not a financial record and reversed. However, in light of its decision in Pennsylvania State Educ. Ass’n v. Commonwealth, Department of Community and Economic Development, 148 A.3d 142 (Pa. 2016) (“PSEA II”), the Court held that this case had to be remanded for the performance of a balancing test to determine whether any of the donors’ personal information may be protected from access under Article 1, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
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