The refusal by Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald to release the city’s bid for Amazon’s second headquarters shows how little regard officials have for the public’s right to know — and how easily the open-records law can be manipulated by government agencies preferring to operate in secret.
Mr. Peduto and Mr. Fitzgerald have declined to turn over copies of the bid partly because they don’t want other cities to know what the city and county offered Amazon in incentives to locate its HQ2 here. Their argument is that secrecy begets competitiveness. Read more…