Jun 10, 2015 3 min read

HARRISBURG – Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf overstepped his powers when he fired the director of Pennsylvania’s Office of Open Records, a state appeals court ruled Wednesday in ordering Erik Arneson be restored to his position with back pay and benefits.

Wolf vowed to appeal the 4-3 Commonwealth Court decision to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court by today.

His spokesman said that would prevent the ruling from taking effect and keep Arneson from returning to the post right away.

“The governor’s position on this has not changed. He was well within his rights to dismiss Erik Arneson. We disagree with the court’s decision, and we will file an appeal,” said Wolf’s spokesman, Jeffrey Sheridan.

Arneson, a longtime Senate Republican aide who was appointed by outgoing GOP Gov. Tom Corbett in his final days in office, said he was eager to return to the records office.

The ruling “is a tremendous step forward” for the agency, Arneson said. “My position has been consistent: The Office of Open Records must be truly independent in order for it to function as it was intended.”

In one of the new governor’s first partisan clashes, Wolf fired Arneson just days after he was named executive director of the agency – and just as promptly, the Senate GOP majority sued to bring him back.

The four-judge majority concluded that the Legislature made clear in the 2008 Right-to-Know Law that created the agency that its director should be independent of the governor’s office.

Lawmakers properly exercised their authority to bar governors from removing the director except for cause, the judges said.

As supporting facts, they cited the director’s six-year term that outlasts a four-year gubernatorial term, the separation of government powers and the agency’s role in making quasi-judicial decisions about what records should be made public.

The governor and the executive director “can often be diametrically opposed” on issues involving the Right-to-Know Law, Judge Patricia McCullough said in the majority opinion.

In a dissent, Judge Dan Pellegrini argued that a governor’s ability to remove appointees without cause should not be compromised.

“While some view elimination of the governor’s without-cause removal power as advancing ‘independence,’ I see it as taking away the executive director’s accountability to the electorate, which is anathema to a representative democracy,” Pellegrini said.

The state constitution says merely that civil officers shall hold their offices “on the condition that they behave themselves well” and be removed only “on conviction of misbehavior in office or of any infamous crime,” Pellegrini said.

A governor’s power to remove officers he has appointed is critical to ensuring that policies that got the governor elected are executed, he said.

“When we limit the governor’s removal of the executive director, we are left with an individual who is virtually untouchable for six years and who is thereby insulated from accountability to elected officials, a hallmark of our democracy,” Pellegrini said.

It remained unclear at midday if and when Arneson would resume his post at the Office of Open Records.