What the ICA Won't Tell You: A Right-to-Know Story from Pennsylvania’s Capital City

By Eric Epstein

I've spent years asking Pennsylvania's public agencies to show their work. Not because I enjoy paperwork, but because that's the Right-to-Know Law: the public pays, the public is owed transparency. So, on March 26, 2026, I filed a seven-part Right-to-Know request with the Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority for Harrisburg — the ICA — the independent state body that oversees the Pennsylvania’s capital city's finances. I wanted answers on collection rates, economic planning, retiree benefit trusts, performance metrics, and a stadium and market that keep getting talked about as "positive developments." I also wanted to see the money behind an amicus brief the ICA had weighed in on, and its communications with a regional economic development group.

Eleven days later, on April 6, the answer came back. It's worth walking through, because the pattern tells its own story.

Five "No Such Records"

Out of seven requests, five came back denied — and not because the ICA claimed an exemption or invoked some carve-out in the law. The response, again and again, was simpler and more troubling: no such record exists in the ICA files.

• No record confirming the city's monthly collection rates hit 95% or better, for two decades of months.

• No Comprehensive Economic Plan on file, despite it supposedly being "developed by the City and shared with" the ICA in 2025.

• No "refined LERTA tool" — the tax-abatement mechanism cities use to spur development — on file either, despite the same claim of it having been shared.

• No documentation of what steps the city has taken to establish an OPEB trust, the fund meant to cover retiree healthcare and other post-employment benefits.

• No performance metrics or statistical analysis showing which city departments are improving and which are falling behind, even though the ICA's own prior public statements referenced exactly that kind of analysis.

For the two of these tied to specific projects — the Broad Street Market and the ballpark referred to as FNP Stadium — the ICA didn't just deny the records. It expressly said the city, not the ICA, would be the one holding this information, "to the extent any such analysis exists." Read that carefully. It's an authority created specifically to oversee Harrisburg's finances telling a taxpayer that it doesn't have basic proof behind claims of fiscal health and economic progress that get repeated in public.

That's the heart of the matter. When an oversight agency says it has no record of the data underlying the claims it's supposed to be overseeing, that's not a technicality. That's a gap between what's said in press releases and hearings and what's actually documented anywhere.

What Came Through

To be fair, two requests were approved. I'll get the amicus curiae brief and the invoices tied to it, and I'll get the ICA's communications with CREDC, the region's economic development corporation — both delivered through a shared folder rather than mailed copies, which is at least an efficient way to hand over real documents. Those records matter, and I'll be going through them.

But two approvals against five "no such record" responses, on a request that specifically asked an oversight authority to substantiate its own oversight, is not a passing grade. It's a mirror held up to how thin the paper trail really is behind some of the numbers and narratives we are told to trust.

The Legal Fine Print That Actually Matters

The ICA's letter leans on a real and important part of the law: a record has to document "a transaction or activity of the agency" and be "created, received or retained" in connection with that agency's business. That's the correct legal test. But it cuts both ways. If the ICA truly has never created or received the documentation behind collection-rate claims, economic plans, or performance metrics — the very things it was created to monitor — then the question isn't whether I filed my request correctly. The question is why an oversight authority isn't generating or retaining oversight records in the first place.

The letter also states, on request #3 about the OPEB trust, that I "am not requesting a record pursuant to the Pennsylvania Right to Know Act." I disagree, and the Office of Open Records exists precisely to referee disagreements like that one.

What the Records Would Have Shown

Here's what makes the "no such record" answers sting more than they might on their own: in the months since I filed this request, the public record has started to fill in some of the gaps the ICA said it couldn't.

Take the Broad Street Market. My request #5 asked for the positive developments and investment tied to the market and to the ballpark project — and the ICA said it had nothing. Meanwhile, the City of Harrisburg's own site and local news outlets have been reporting that reconstruction of the market's fire-damaged brick building, destroyed in July 2023, is now not expected to be finished until May 2027 — nearly four years after the fire, pushed back repeatedly by demolition delays, winter damage, and slow contractor bidding on utility work for the temporary tent space. That's not a "positive development" story. It's a project that has struggled for years. If the ICA truly holds no records on this, it raises the question of how an oversight authority is supposed to oversee anything.

Then there's request #4, where I asked for the performance metrics showing which city departments were making progress and which were falling behind. Again: no record. But local reporting this month lays out a concrete example of exactly that kind of shortfall. Harrisburg was awarded a $13 million state grant back in 2022 to renovate four city parks — Reservoir, Wilson, 7th & Radnor, and Gorgas. Three of the four got done. Reservoir Park didn't, despite the state granting the city four separate deadline extensions along the way. The result: Harrisburg now owes the Commonwealth roughly $2.3 million back, and City Council is scrambling to cover it by pulling money from other city budgets, including streets and roads and the special events fund. That is precisely the kind of department-by-department performance gap my request was trying to surface — and precisely the kind of thing an authority tasked with financial oversight of Harrisburg ought to be tracking.

I'm not suggesting the ICA fabricated its denials. I take them at their word that these documents aren't sitting in their files. But that's exactly the problem. The real-world outcomes — a market rebuild running years behind, a parks grant partially forfeited and now being repaid out of other city funds — are the kinds of things performance metrics and economic plans are supposed to catch early. If the agency created to watch over Harrisburg's finances isn't generating or keeping that paperwork, taxpayers are left finding out about the shortfalls after the money's already gone, from news coverage instead of oversight.

Why I'll Appeal

Under Section 1101 of the RTKL, I have fifteen business days from the mailing date to appeal any denial to the Office of Open Records at 333 Market Street in Harrisburg. I intend to use every one of them on at least some of these denials, because the RTKL is not supposed to be a formality agencies satisfy by saying "we don't have it" and moving on. It's supposed to be a mechanism that forces public bodies to keep, and produce, the paper trail behind the claims they make about how well they're managing the public's money.

If the ICA genuinely holds nothing behind the numbers it cites for Harrisburg's fiscal turnaround, taxpayers deserve to know that just as much as they'd deserve to see the records themselves. Either way, the answer is worth pursuing — and I'll keep pushing until I get one.

Eric Epstein leads Rock the Capital and advocates for government transparency and accountability in Pennsylvania.