Court Calls Out Pa. County For Politicizing School Reopening During COVID

Nearly four years after then-Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration leaned on Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, to overrule its own health director’s COVID-19 school reopening guidance and impose much stricter conditions, an appeals court has upheld punishing the county for withholding records that could identify who exactly changed the guidance.

The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the maximum penalty under the Right to Know Law against Bucks County on Thursday for “bad faith denial of public records” to Megan Brock, a self-described “normie mom”-turned-investigative reporter.

More than two years earlier, the Court of Common Pleas found the county withheld documents that “clearly existed, fell within the RTK Requests at issue and were not protected from disclosure by any exemption under the RTKL,” imposing a $3,000 penalty.

It’s the third-straight loss for Bucks County, with the Office of Open Records first finding in May 2022 it wrongly redacted work email addresses “held out to the public” and didn’t show the records qualified for “pre-decisional deliberation,” attorney-client privilege or draft exemptions, but the office declined to find sanctionable bad faith out of deference to courts.

“Instead of complying, they sued me 5 times to overturn the appeal,” Brock wrote in a lengthy X thread Thursday night on her victory. “While the county had an entire legal department at their disposal to fight me, I was going to have to represent myself, spend thousands in legal fees or give up” until conservative powerhouse Judicial Watch stepped in.

Brock noted that Democratic county Commissioner Diane Marseglia admitted blocking her phone number from a constituent-comment line but claimed it was accidental that Brock was blocked from all county government lines for 18 months.