Meeting the Pennsylvania Right-to-Know 5-Business-Day Deadline

A Pennsylvania agency has five business days to respond to a written Right-to-Know request. Under the Right-to-Know Law (Act 3 of 2008, 65 P.S. §§ 67.101 et seq.), the day the request is received is not counted, and the clock begins on the next business day. The Office of Open Records, which administers the law, treats this window as firm: a response that does not arrive — or is not properly extended — within five business days is deemed a denial the requester can appeal. For most county and municipal offices, the law is not the obstacle. The obstacle is operational. Finding the record, pulling it from wherever it lives, and redacting protected content inside five business days is difficult when the records are paper. This post addresses that workflow, not the retention schedules and deadlines covered elsewhere in our compliance library.

What does the Right-to-Know Law require within five business days?

The Commonwealth's Office of Administration policy lays out the mechanics precisely. After a written request reaches the Open Records Officer, the agency has five business days to issue one of four responses: grant access, deny access, partially grant and partially deny, or issue an interim response invoking a permitted 30-calendar-day extension. The interim response is the relief valve, but it is conditional. An agency may extend only for specific reasons named in Section 902 — among them retrieval of a record stored in a remote location, a bona fide staffing limitation, or the need to redact a public record. If none of those conditions genuinely apply, the agency owes a full response in five business days.

Why do paper records make the deadline hard to meet?

The reasons an agency is permitted to invoke an extension are, almost word for word, the reasons paper records cause delay. A record in a remote location — an off-site warehouse, a basement, a separate department — cannot be produced same-day; someone has to physically travel to it. A staffing limitation bites hardest when locating a single file means one clerk searching cabinets by hand. Redaction of a Social Security number or a Section 708 exempt field, done with a marker and a photocopier, consumes hours and leaves an imperfect record. Each extension is legal, but each one delays the public, signals an office under strain, and starts a 30-day clock that still has to be met.

How do digitized, indexed records change the workflow?

When records are scanned to PDF/A and held in a central, full-text-indexed repository, the three statutory grounds for delay largely disappear. A record in a 'remote location' becomes a search result, retrieved from your desk in seconds rather than a trip to an off-site facility. A 'staffing limitation' eases when full-text search lets one Open Records Officer surface every responsive document without a team combing files. And redaction moves from manual blackout to electronic redaction inside an ECM platform — applied once, logged, and reproducible. Reynolds delivers this through Laserfiche, where we are a Laserfiche Gold Partner, with all digitization performed to PHMC standards including PDF/A. Our document scanning services, detailed at /document-solutions/scanning, convert backfile and active records into searchable, redaction-ready form.

What does this look like for a Pennsylvania county office?

Reynolds has built records workflows for Northampton County, Monroe County, and more than 30 Pennsylvania counties. Northampton County's seat is Easton, minutes from our Emmaus headquarters in the Lehigh Valley — these are local engagements, not remote contracts run from another state. The pattern is consistent: backfile records are digitized to PDF/A, indexed for full-text retrieval, and loaded into Laserfiche, where electronic redaction and audit logging support the request-response duties the Right-to-Know Law assigns to the Open Records Officer. Active records are captured the same way going forward, so the repository stays current. More on our government practice is at /industries/government.

How do counties procure this without a competitive bid?

Procurement is often the quiet blocker. Pennsylvania county and municipal offices can purchase through COSTARS, the Commonwealth's cooperative purchasing program administered by the Department of General Services, which lets eligible local entities buy from approved suppliers without running a separate competitive bid. Reynolds participates in COSTARS, which shortens the path from 'we need this' to 'this is running' — relevant when an open-records backlog or a recent deemed denial has made the timeline urgent.

Does this also cover FOIA and PHMC obligations?

The federal Freedom of Information Act governs federal agencies, not Pennsylvania local government; for counties and municipalities, the Right-to-Know Law is the operative statute. The two share the same operational reality, though — a request arrives, responsive records must be found, exempt content redacted, and a response issued on a deadline. The same digitized, indexed foundation serves both. It also aligns with the records-management standards the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission sets for public records, including PDF/A as the archival format, so the work that makes you fast on Right-to-Know requests is the same work that keeps you compliant with PHMC.

Why Reynolds

Reynolds Business Systems has served Pennsylvania organizations since 1970 — 55-plus years, family-owned, headquartered in Emmaus and serving PA, NJ, DE, and MD. We hold a 100% client retention rate, a 14-year average staff tenure, and a 100% accuracy guarantee across more than 3,000 projects for 750 active clients. For a county or municipal office, that tenure is the operational point: the people who index your records and configure your redaction rules are the people who will still be a phone call away when the next request lands. To discuss a Right-to-Know request workflow for your office, call (610) 398-9080.