Hartman v. Department of Conservation and Natural Resources

In Hartman v. Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, 892 A.2d 897 (Pa. Cmwlth. 2006) the agency denied a request for the names and addresses of registered snowmobile owners on the grounds that: (1) the records were not "public records" and; (2) they were exempt from disclosure under the law's personal security exception as well as the privacy guarantee set forth in Article I, section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution. The court first concluded that the information was excepted from the law's definition of a public record because its release was prohibited by the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994, 18 U.S.C. 2721-2725. Although observing that this determination technically ended the court's inquiry, we proceeded to address the question of whether the requested information also was shielded from disclosure under the law's reputation and personal security exceptions. The Court then stated that it interprets the law's personal security and reputation exceptions "as creating a privacy exception to the law's general rule of disclosure. It is also generally accepted that a person has a privacy interest in his or her home address." Hartman, 892 A.2d at 905.