Earlier this year, Upper Darby Chief Administrative Officer Crandall Jones signed messages as the township’s Agency Open Records Officer (AORO) — before Township Council confirmed him as such.

And, despite the May 15 confirmation, Jones’s predecessor as AORO, Administrative Services Director Scott Alberts, remained the only Upper Darby records officer listed on the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records (OOR) website until last Thursday. That was one day after Broad + Liberty called Jones’s office to ask about his apparent unregistered status.

State law requires an AORO to register with the OOR, though no penalties result from failure to do so.

Record transparency has become a major concern in Upper Darby, a township recently scrutinized over its handling of federal community-development grants, COVID-era stimulus, employee benefits, parking fees and other fiscal issues.

On May 15, Upper Darby Township Council voted to confirm Jones’s nomination to the open-records post. An eight-member majority supported appointing him while two councilpersons, 1st-District Republican Meaghan Wagner and At-Large Independent Laura Wentz, abstained. Brian Andruszko, a 3rd-District Republican who sometimes criticizes the township administration alongside Wagner and Wentz, was absent.

The vote came after John DeMasi, an Upper Darby resident and activist, filed multiple Right to Know Law (RTK) requests for documents in 2024 concerning township spending and taxation. The municipality responded numerous times with denials, some from Jones and others signed by Alberts.

DeMasi was used to receiving responses from Alberts, but he hadn’t seen any indication Jones was authorized to perform the same task. So he filed an RTK request on April 25, 2024 asking for any documents showing Jones’s appointment as Upper Darby’s AORO. They responded on May 2 that they had no such document.

DeMasi appealed to the OOR the following day.

“The township must have some sort of document showing that the AORO has been changed to Crandall jones [sic] from Scott Alberts,” he wrote, “otherwise, one of the two people who have stated they are the AORO were not the person, and the township has not been handling RTKs correctly.”

In response, on May 13, Jones signed a declaration that “I serve as the Agency Open Records Officer (‘AORO’) for Upper Darby Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania and am responsible of responding to Right-to-Know requests.” He added that he knows the township’s record-keeping system and “conducted a good faith search” for documentation on his appointment and “determined that there were no responsive records at this time.”

The following day, Township Solicitor Kailie J. Melchior penned a reply to DeMasi arguing that Jones’s written assertion settled the matter.

“Under [Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Law], an attestation made under the penalty of perjury may serve as sufficient evidentiary support,” she wrote, citing examples of germane case law. “In the absence of any competent evidence that the Office acted in bad faith, ‘the averments in [the attestation] should be accepted as true.’…No evidence of bad faith has been presented by Requester.”

That was one day before Council voted to make Jones AORO.

According to Melissa Melewsky, media-law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, the Keystone State’s RTK law does not specify how a locality must appoint its AORO. But she added that transparency behooves the agency to at least document the appointment somehow.

“As far as evidence goes, if the person is acting as the right-to-know-law official, there should be records to back it up,” she said.

Melewsky added that public offices need to occasionally assign another person to field record requests because the official designee will sometimes be on vacation or medical leave.

Upper Darby Mayor Ed Brown (D), in a report issued after hitting his 100-day mark as mayor on April 11, alluded to assigning document-request responsibilities to Jones’s office.

“Mr. Jones…,” Brown wrote, “has already… [m]oved the Right-to-Know process back to the CAO’s office and modernized the Right-to-Know process to improve compliance with RTK requirements and coordinate and streamline departmental responses to RTK requests….”

Jones would remain unconfirmed for another month after the mayor wrote this. This is in contrast to Jones’s previous service as municipal administrator for Norristown Borough in Montgomery County. There, his appointment as RTK officer was overseen by Borough Council and renewed several times — as recently as this January, about a month before he started working for Upper Darby. 

And no evidence of Jones’s registration would emerge for another three months after the mayor’s statement. Broad + Liberty contacted Jones and Brown to ask whether Jones took any steps to register with the OOR but neither replied. When Jones’s executive assistant Crystal Henry, who was appointed his deputy RTK officer, was asked on Wednesday whether she or Jones registered as AORO, she said, “Not that I’m aware of.”

In Melewsky’s view, registration matters greatly for any open-records officer.

“I think it’s critically important because ultimately the Office of Open Records is supposed to be the one-stop shop for open-records information,” she said. “That’s their core purpose; that’s why they have taxpayer dollars to function as the right-to-know-law hub. And if the information they have isn’t accurate or up-to-date, it impacts how effective that office can be and it also impacts transparency across the state, because if folks don’t know where to request records, it makes it that much more difficult to do so….”

On Wednesday, Broad + Liberty received an email from an OOR administrative officer saying he did not have information about whether Jones or Henry ever attempted to register as Upper Darby AORO. On Friday, the OOR staffer wrote a follow up email stating “our office has since received an update to the township’s registration.”

The OOR itself stresses the importance of not only registration but open-records education. In its website’s FAQ section, the office advises, “Make sure the AORO is registered with the OOR.” The same subsection recommends “attend[ing] one or more [RTK] training sessions, or contact[ing] the OOR to request that one be scheduled in your area.”

Henry did not directly address whether she or Jones had been to a training session, noting only that such events are held locally. 

Melewsky said undergoing RTK training is important for any AORO, though state statute doesn’t mandate it.

“You really have to understand the statute and the interpreting case law to apply the law properly and understand the purpose of the law, its function, what it says, what it doesn’t say, what it requires,” she said. “And you can’t do any of that without training.”

DeMasi said he believes the Brown administration has been unconvincing that it handled Jones’s appointment properly.

“Based on his history, I don’t understand why he just thought that he was the official,” DeMasi told Broad + Liberty. “And when I asked for documentation, they said they didn’t have any. So, was there no process? Did someone just say, ‘Oh yeah: Today, you’re the AORO?’ And if that was all true, why did they need an ordinance?”

DeMasi also insisted that AOROs should timely register with the state.

“If you’re going to have transparency and … compliance with state regulations, you’ve got to inform the oversight agency of who is ultimately responsible for being that officer,” he said.

Broad + Liberty has itself faced resistance from the township on records requests, most recently regarding community-development spending in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

In March, this outlet requested access to about 64 boxes of pertinent HUD documents that had been slated for shredding, but Upper Darby responded it would need to charge an estimated $32,050 to photocopy them all before a reporter could see them. (Official documents cite various numbers of boxes, all between 60 and 70.)

The request for the documents was made at a time when Broad + Liberty had reason to believe HUD was investigating the township for improper spending of grant money, something later confirmed by a letter HUD sent the township.

After appealing to the OOR, investigative reporter Todd Shepherd received a final determination last Wednesday. The agency said, “The Township has not demonstrated that its prepayment estimate is valid” and the “Township is required to provide the Requester with a good-faith estimate of fees.”

Bradley Vasoli is a writer and media strategist in Pennsylvania. You can follow him on X at @BVasoli.