A Lackawanna County judge affirmed a Pennsylvania Office of Open Records decision requiring the county to provide requested records related to its recent reassessment \u2014 records the county claimed were exempt from disclosure under the state\u2019s Right to Know Law.<\/p>\n
The case stems from a Right to Know request then-county property owner Michael Marcavage filed in April 2025 seeking electronic copies of all tentative assessed values calculated for Carbondale and Fell Twp. properties during the county\u2019s first comprehensive property reassessment in nearly six decades. Those and other tentative assessed values, calculated by vendor Tyler Technologies, were mailed to property owners last year prior to a reassessment appeals process where owners who disagreed with their new values could challenge them.<\/p>\n
Reassessment is designed to achieve tax fairness by bringing assessed values used to generate property tax bills in line with fair market values, or what a property should sell for on the real estate market. The yearslong process of updating assessed values countywide for the first time since the late 1960s wrapped up last year, with the new values taking effect in January following the monthslong appeals process.<\/p>\n
Marcavage, a real estate investor, requested from the county electronic copies of \u201call tentative property values being proposed by Tyler Technologies on behalf of Lackawanna County for properties in Fell Township (Simpson) and Carbondale,\u201d noting in his request that a \u201cspreadsheet that includes the proposed tentative values along with the corresponding property addresses would be sufficient.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also advised that the Office of Open Records, or OOR, had previously ruled in another case, Marcavage v. Delaware County, that similar assessment data was subject to disclosure.<\/p>\n
The county exercised a 30-day extension to respond to the request but ultimately denied it on multiple grounds, claiming the records were exempt from disclosure because the requested tentative values were \u201cdraft\u201d materials and constituted \u201cinternal, predecisional deliberations\u201d of the county.<\/p>\n
It also cited a section of the Right to Know Law stating agencies aren\u2019t required to create records that don\u2019t exist, with county Assessment Director Patrick Tobin attesting in a subsequent affidavit that a spreadsheet of the tentative values \u201cdoes not currently exist and would need to be prepared by the assessment office\u201d in violation of that section.<\/p>\n
Marcavage appealed to the OOR in late May 2025, and prevailed.<\/p>\n
The agency determined that, to the extent the county interpreted Marcavage\u2019s request as seeking only a spreadsheet of the tentative values, that interpretation was unreasonable. It also determined the exemption for draft materials did not apply, as the electronic records requested didn\u2019t fall into any of several specific categories enumerated in the Right to Know Law, and that the records weren\u2019t exempt as \u201cinternal, predecisional deliberations,\u201d since the values had been mailed to property owners and, as such, were not internal to the county.<\/p>\n
The OOR issued a \u201cfinal determination\u201d in June 2025 directing the county to provide the records within 30 days, but did not find the county acted in bad faith by issuing the denial. The county subsequently appealed the OOR decision in county court, where Judge Terrence R. Nealon ultimately issued the recent order affirming the agency\u2019s conclusions.<\/p>\n
Part of Nealon\u2019s Sept. 11 ruling says the county had an obligation to contact Tyler Technologies to \u201cascertain whether it possessed the requested electronic records,\u201d noting it\u2019s \u201cdifficult to envision why the County or Tyler Technologies could not retrieve the requested information from existing electronic databases.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among other case law, that section of the ruling cites SWB Yankees LLC v. Wintermantel, a 2012 case where the state Supreme Court ruled on an appeal by The Times-Tribune that records kept by a government contractor are subject to disclosure under the Right to Know Law if the contractor is performing a governmental function and the records directly relate to that function.<\/p>\n
Nealon\u2019s order affirming the OOR decision gives the county 30 days to provide the records but denied Marcavage\u2019s request for a finding that the county acted in bad faith.<\/p>\n
The current usefulness of the requested records is unclear, given that the county completed the reassessment last year. But Marcavage, who called the county\u2019s position absurd, celebrated Nealon\u2019s ruling as a \u201cresounding victory for government transparency and a decisive vindication of the taxpayers\u2019 right to know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJudge Nealon\u2019s opinion doesn\u2019t just grant taxpayers access to these records; it completely dismantles the county\u2019s baseless attempt to hide public data behind legal gymnastics,\u201d he said in a statement. \u201cThe court firmly upheld the integrity of the Right-to-Know Law, sending an unmistakable message to local officials: public records belong to the public, period.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the attorneys representing the county in the court case, Brendan Fitzgerald of the firm Joyce, Carmody & Moran, acknowledged the court order in an email Thursday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are recently in receipt of Judge Nealon\u2019s Order, which we respect, and we expect to be reviewing and discussing next steps with county officials this week,\u201d he said. \u201cWe cannot comment on those next steps at this time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Lackawanna County judge affirmed a Pennsylvania Office of Open Records decision requiring the county to provide requested…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":289024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[46,201,182,139,28,178,180,179,181],"class_list":["post-289023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-courts","tag-lackawanna-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news","tag-top-stories-stt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}