Watchdogs Focus on Pennsylvania Local Government
This article originally appeared at RealClear Politics.
“A republic, if you can keep it.” Kirk Allen and John Kraft begin every Edgar County Watchdogs training with the same Benjamin Franklin quote. Lamenting the loss of basic American civics, these local government ethics activists travel the nation conducting “Citizen Watchdog Trainings” – when they’re not back in southern Illinois investigating and suing government officials.
“Ben Franklin’s statement is a challenge to each of us,” says Allen, “and we’re rising to that challenge and teaching others to do so as well.” Having known about the Edgar County Watchdogs’ success stories – they’ve ousted 732 government officials and counting – I attended a training this month in Pittsburgh to find out just what the region’s new contingent would be learning.
Their first lesson? “Accountability isn’t partisan,” Allen reminded his audience. “The law should apply equally no matter who you voted for.” The Watchdogs have worked across the political spectrum, from gun rights advocates to racial justice protestors. In one case, Kraft fought against a township official’s proposal to charge a fee at one of the local parks, exposing private Facebook messages that showed the policy was racially motivated. “If you try to use these tactics to support one party or other, it dilutes the message that justice is for everyone.”
Though they’ve been labeled “busybodies,” and one irate state’s attorney even called them “the hayseeds from Southern Illinois,” Allen and Kraft live by one rule: if taxpayers fund you, you answer to taxpayers. Local officials can be trenchant in defense of their little fiefdoms, they warned attendees, so you have to be ready for a war of attrition.
This typically means the long, plodding process of applying for right-to-know requests, learning how to phrase and appeal them, and going to court when information is withheld. Attendees learned exactly how this process works, and how it can be enhanced by a thorough knowledge of the law. Sometimes this can mean reading through twenty years’ worth of meeting minutes, as Allen did to identify his county’s 911 dispatch certification records. “It wasn’t difficult,” Allen quipped, “compared to when I had to read the entire Affordable Care Act.”
The Watchdogs customized their presentation for Pennsylvania. They gave glowing reviews of the state’s Ethics Act, which imposes harsher criminal penalties than most states on government officials who violate its rules on transparency, conflict of interest, and wrongful use, among other malfeasance. Since Pennsylvania is a “Dillon’s Rule state,” they explained, local ordinances and charters cannot violate this state code, which imposes high standards: school directors, for example, can be held individually liable for approving expenditures that are not permitted.
Along with these valuable facts and tools, Allen and Kraft provided examples of news they believed citizens should pursue, like an alleged violation of Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Law in Mercer County. But many locals had already come prepared with questions about how to scrutinize the actions of their school districts, municipal governments, and law enforcement.
One of the attendees, Shelia Hanlon, has lived in Allegheny County for 67 years. She served as a township manager nearly 20 years ago but says her position was changed from elected to appointed by officials who wanted to install a more compliant manager. “Republicans need to be educated on local issues,” Shelia said. “Accountability to taxpayers at the local level is one of the most fundamental rights we have as Americans.”
Another attendee, a young woman named Katie Hersh, volunteers with Back to School PA, a group of PACs trying to increase parental involvement in local public school districts. “We’re hoping to train parents in the tools we’re learning here so they can increase transparency,” she said. “Whether it’s overspending and tax increases, critical race theory, or school closures and mandates – the parents and students being affected need to know what’s going on.”
Many other attendees described themselves as election precinct volunteers, and about half had attended a public meeting of local government. The demographics of Pittsburgh’s aspiring watchdogs are noteworthy. Most (around 70%) were retirement age, with the necessary free time to engage in the task of holding local officials accountable. Kraft was particularly attuned to the age gap in technical knowledge, counseling the attendees to use encrypted apps like Signal, ProtonMail, and Sync, and to “never store anything confidential or valuable on Google-owned products like YouTube.”
If the citizen accountability movement spreads from Illinois to western Pennsylvania, Allen warned, “do not expect local or national media to be your friend.” In their experience, he said, local media is bound up with local power structures – and it can be hard to get national media’s attention. They’ve tried: national outlets were uninterested, they said, in discussing even their biggest stories, such as exposing the College of DuPage scandalor performing a citizen’s arrest on an entire park district board.
But if the Watchdogs keep up their pressure on government corruption, national media will be unable to ignore them. Cleaning house at the state and local level will reverberate nationwide. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously called states “the laboratories of democracy.” Allen adds, “local politics is the recruitment ground for state and national politics – so let’s make sure our local officials have integrity.”
If a new movement of citizen watchdogs starts holding government officials’ feet to the fire, integrity might make a comeback in American politics. What if such a movement is all it takes to answer Benjamin Franklin’s challenge and keep our republic?
