When Gov. Ed Rendell phoned Terry Mutchler in 2008, he told her, “You’re either up for a really incredible challenge or you’re a little bit crazy.”
The statute establishing the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records was about to become law, and Rendell wanted Mutchler, a former journalist and lawyer, to lead it.
“I think it might be a little mix of both,” Mutchler told a packed dining room June 7 at the Pyramid Club, on the 52nd floor of the Mellon Bank Center on Market Street with sweeping views of City Hall and the Ben Franklin Bridge.
Mutchler was there to accept the Bob Edgar Public Service Achievement Award presented by Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that advocates for government accountability. Her partner of 11 years, Maria Papacostaki, joined her at the ceremony.
Mutchler, who grew up in the Poconos, served as the executive director of the Office of Open Records for seven years. She now leads the transparency practice within Pepper Hamilton’s media and communications practice group. Mutchler also worked as Illinois’ first Public Access Counselor and wrote the acclaimed memoir, “Under This Beautiful Dome: A Senator, A Journalist and the Politics of Gay Love in America,” about her relationship with state Sen. Penny Severns.
Also receiving the public-service award that night was John Bogle, founder of Vanguard, the first mutual-fund firm owned by its clients.
Barry Kauffman, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, commended both honorees for making Pennsylvania a model state in accountability. The commonwealth used to have a hostile reputation when it came to facilitating transparency.
Of Mutchler, he said she “became the engineer given the daunting task” of building the state’s Office of Open Records from scratch.
“You assembled a top-notch staff, you created clear guidelines, you created effective communication systems and educational programs … ,” Kauffman said. “Your underlying efforts gave Pennsylvanians true ownership of the access to public records and then you ensured that those rights were defended.”
Mutchler said when she started the Office of Open Records, she was given a copy of the new law and stuck in a cubicle. By the time she hired her first staffer, they had temporary office space in the back of a dismantled library.
“We started this endeavor for transparency in government with folding tables and a landline,” Mutchler said. “What we were facing was a tremendous kind of a philosophical fight.”
She said government officials didn’t trust her because she was a former reporter, and they worried about having to share more than they wanted. Mutchler’s pals in the press didn’t trust her either because she was now a government official, a position they presumed came with a less-than-forthcoming agenda.
Rendell, by way of introducing Mutchler at the award ceremony, said he told her she would be the loneliest person in the commonwealth if she agreed to lead the Office of Open Records.
“Nobody is going to like you, myself included,” Rendell remembered telling Mutchler. “But you will do the right thing.”
“Not only did I complain about Terry,” Rendell joked, “but I had to listen to everyone in the legislature calling me and saying, ‘Why did you appoint that woman?’ I knew by the calls they were generating that Terry was doing a good job. I knew by the angst that she caused our administration, she was doing a good job.”
Mutchler called Rendell a champ for handling their interactions with grace, even when she had to call him for the release of emails or other documents to everyone from interested citizens to reporters with The New York Times.
Mutchler closed by commending Erik Arneson, the current executive director of the Office of Open Records.
“If I’ve laid the proper vision … what that will mean is every [director] is better than the one before,” she said. “Someday, someone will stand at a Common Cause platform and say Terry Mutchler was the worst executive director of the Office of Open Records.”