Pennsylvania Right-to-Know Request Automation: A Township & County Playbook

Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law gives an agency's open-records officer five business days to respond to a written request, and a missed deadline counts as a deemed denial the requester can appeal. Knowing the deadline is the easy part. The operational problem most townships and counties actually face is that a Right-to-Know (RTK) request has to move through several hands — intake, routing to the record's custodian department, legal or redaction review, and a tracked response — inside that same five-day window, using whatever combination of email, shared drives, and paper folders the office already has.

This playbook lays out what a Laserfiche-based RTK workflow looks like for a Pennsylvania township or county, how it connects to the records already under a PHMC retention schedule, and a practical sequence for rolling it out without disrupting requests already in flight.

Why manual RTK intake breaks down

In a manual process, an RTK request typically arrives by email or in person, gets forwarded to whichever staff member the open-records officer thinks holds the record, and then waits on that person's own priorities to locate the document, decide what (if anything) needs redaction, and reply. Every handoff is invisible to the open-records officer until it comes back, which makes the five-day clock the one thing nobody is actually tracking in real time. The most common failure mode is not bad faith — it's simply that the request sat in an inbox two of the five days were already gone before anyone started working it.

What a Laserfiche-based RTK workflow looks like

A workflow-automated version of the same process starts with a structured intake form instead of a raw email, which captures the requester, the records sought, and the date received — starting the clock automatically rather than relying on someone to note it. From there, the workflow routes the request to the correct custodian department based on the record type, tracks whether a redaction or legal review step is required, and logs every stage with a timestamp. Because the workflow runs on the same platform that holds the underlying records, the person handling the request can pull the actual document, apply redactions, and route the finished response — without leaving the system or re-keying anything into a separate tracking spreadsheet.

Mapping requests to your retention schedule

Most RTK requests touch records that are already governed by a PHMC Local Government Records Committee retention schedule. Building the RTK workflow on top of the same records structure — rather than as a separate RTK-only log — means the office can answer “do we still have this record, and are we required to?” from one system, instead of cross-referencing an RTK tracker against a separate retention schedule by hand.

The audit trail regulators and requesters both want

The Pennsylvania Office of Open Records hears appeals when a request is deemed denied or when a requester disputes a fee or a redaction. A workflow that logs intake date, routing, review, and response gives the open-records officer a complete, timestamped record to produce if a response is ever appealed — rather than reconstructing the timeline from email threads after the fact.

Rollout sequence for a township or county

Start with a single department that handles a steady but manageable volume of RTK requests — police records or the recorder of deeds are common starting points — and run the workflow alongside the existing process for a short pilot period rather than switching everything over at once. Use the pilot to confirm the routing rules match how requests actually move in your office, then expand department by department. Because the workflow sits on top of the records platform rather than replacing it, departments that haven't been onboarded yet can keep working normally while the rollout continues.

For a platform-level comparison of why a records-management system, not general file storage, matters for this workflow, see Laserfiche vs. SharePoint for County Government Records Management. For the retention schedule this workflow routes against, see the Pennsylvania County Records Retention Quick-Reference, and for the digitization side of the same records program, see Government Records Digitization in Pennsylvania.