Sharing public records can be used to keep local governments accountable. Read ahead to find out how the Philly Transit Riders Union used DocumentCloud’s annotation feature to highlight public documents with their members and share them with local reporters and the public.

The Philly Transit Riders Union is an advocacy organization that joins “riders, workers, and residents to fight for expanding and maintaining transit access to everyone in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Area.” DocumentCloud has been working with a select group of organizations like the Philly Transit Riders Union to see how DocumentCloud can be used outside of traditional journalism.

Keeping executives accountable

In March 2020, executives at the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, more commonly known as SEPTA, pledged a 10% pay cut for General Manager Leslie S. Richards and the executive team, citing ‘mounting operating losses’ due to shutdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Following a tip from a shop steward at the Transport Workers Union Local 234 and a public records request, the Philly Transit Riders Union obtained the records of the executive’s pay stubs and uploaded these documents to DocumentCloud.

DocumentCloud’s annotation tool was crucial for the team to follow these pay cuts.

“We used the annotations tool on this one to track when the ‘10% executive solidarity pay cut’ began and ended for all these different executives,” said Nat Lownes, member of the Philly Transit Riders Union. They found that some of the announced pay cuts never happened, and others were shorter than promised. An assistant general manager named Kim Scott Heinle, for example, took a pay cut for only two pay periods.

The Philly Transit Riders Union took these documents to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which published multiple pieces on the pay cuts. “We pitched it to Juliana Feliciano Reyes at the Inquirer, who wrote this initial story and then a meta records request story and a focus on investigating SEPTA executive separation agreements.”

In response to these documents, SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch said to the Inquirer that neither Heinle nor SEPTA’s finance staff knew why Heinle did not receive the full 10-week pay cut, as Heinle had not requested an exemption.

Monitoring pandemic overcrowding

The Philly Transit Riders Union also used the annotation tool to uncover conversations SEPTA employees were having about their own organization. After obtaining email communications from SEPTA through a public records request, the team read through these communications to find that there were SEPTA employees within the union’s private Facebook group and even screenshot members’ comments and posts.

“More broadly the responsive materials really painted a picture of a strange, insecure, kinda dysfunctional campaign target; spying on the Philly Transit Riders Union mailing list, the frantic scanning of social media before board meetings,” Lownes said.

“We used the annotations tool mostly to highlight to members that organizing works and added bonus it revealed how the transit agency responds to pressure,” Lownes continued.

These communications also revealed how the agency tracked the Philly Transit Riders Union, including social media monitoring of the organization’s activities and reporting on their broadcast ahead of a SEPTA board meeting.

Key takeaways

The Philly Transit Riders Union share their key takeaways from using DocumentCloud:

• DocumentCloud’s annotation tool can help organize you and your team and highlight key information in more unruly documents.

• Uploading and annotating documents in DocumentCloud can make sharing easier within your own organization or to outside groups, including newsrooms.

• Obtaining email communications through public records requests can offer insight to how local agencies are talking about your organization.

DocumentCloud offers a growing range of tools to support civic transparency, including through its Add-Ons platform that can do everything from help detect bad redactions to ensure materials remain available through decentralized storage technologies like IPFS and Filecoin. Join one of our free monthly webinars or MuckRock’s Slack channel to learn more.

MuckRock’s work on Add-Ons and the decentralized web is supported by the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. This article has been updated to include additional links to DocumentCloud’s Add-Ons and information on its capabilities.