PN: Commission's Recommendations Will Remain Secret

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

July 14, 2011 | 12:45 PM

The Patriot News’ Don Gilliland has an interesting scoop on tomorrow’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission meeting. According to his Patriot-News report, the panel will deliberate and vote on its recommendations in public – but the recommendations themselves will remain secret.
UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION (1:40 PM) – As explained in the excerpt below, the public will be able to read the recommendations on Friday, July 22nd. They’ll stay confidential during tomorrow’s meeting,however – even though discussion about them will take place in public. I’ve reached out to Cawley’s spokesman for an explanation of the reasoning behind this move, and will post new information as soon as I get it.
Confused? Here’s what Gilliland wrote:

The public will be able to watch the vote, but will not be able to see what is being voted on.
The recommendations are secret, say commission officials.
Recommendations which receive approval from the full commission will be released to the public a week later, after they are rewritten and presented to the governor.
The ones that don’t pass will remain secret.
“We will not be releasing any of the other recommendations,” Chad Saylor, spokesman for Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley, said Tuesday
“From a public access perspective, it’s problematic — especially for something as important as Marcellus Shale,” said Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association.

A reminder – whether or not the recommendations are secret, I’ll be liveblogging the meeting tomorrow at the StateImpact site.
UPDATE: The Post-Gazette’s Laura Olson tracked Lieutenant Governor Jim Cawley down in the Capitol a few minutes ago. According to her tweet, he’s promising “public discussion of recommendations” tomorrow. So even if the wording remains secret, we’ll have an idea of what will be in the final report.