WHEN SEPTA SUED ME

Inquirer reporter Juliana Feliciano Reyes requested separation agreements from SEPTA. Here’s how far the transportation agency went to hide them.

• By Juliana Feliciano Reyes
• Published Sep 14, 2022

Earlier this year, I was eagerly awaiting a set of unredacted public records from SEPTA that the state had ordered the transit agency to give me.

They were separation agreements for six executives over the last 10 years, and an insider had told us that the documents revealed the kinds of cushy deals SEPTA cut with managers it had asked to leave.

Instead, SEPTA sued me.

Case No. 143 C.D. 2022, or SEPTA v. Reyes, was the transportation authority’s move to stop The Inquirer and the public from ever seeing those agreements.

We ultimately won access to the documents. But the ordeal we went through to uncover them shows the lengths SEPTA takes to block access to records that should be public under state law.

As journalists, it’s our job to hold government officials accountable, and one of the ways we do that is by routinely asking public agencies for copies of their records. These records are supposed to be available to everyone, though the law allows certain information to be redacted or withheld in order to protect things like personal privacy, ongoing investigations, and trade secrets.

My colleague Thomas Fitzgerald and I first heard about these separation deals last year, after we wrote a story about how SEPTA’s pandemic pay cuts didn’t hit its executive equally, as the agency had said they would.

The reason one executive — Ron Hopkins, assistant general manager for operations — didn’t take the pay cut was because before the pandemic, he had gotten a deal to leave. He would resign but continue to earn his full $201,000 salary, plus health benefits, for more than a year, we would later learn.

Hopkins did not respond to requests for comment back then, or now.

• I requested six unredacted separation agreements last September. SEPTA refused, sending me records that were almost completely blacked out except for the executives’ names and the dates the agreements were signed.

• Using an outside firm it had hired, SEPTA said that the agreements were actually “termination letters” and that redacting “information regarding discipline, demotion or discharge contained in a personnel file” was allowed under Pennsylvania’s Right to Know law. I appealed, arguing the agreements were financial records of a settlement, which are not exempt.

• By January, the state’s Office of Open Records sided with me, and told SEPTA to get me the unredacted records within 30 days. I was thrilled. Baby’s first successful open records appeal. Then SEPTA went to Commonwealth Court and filed an appeal. And with it, baby’s first lawsuit.

I was more frustrated than nervous. Why was SEPTA going through all this to hide these records? And spending the public’s money to do so?

SEPTA’s done this before. Last year, it sued WHYY/Billy Penn reporter Michaela Winberg to keep some sexual harassment records private after the state ordered SEPTA to release them.

Fortunately, we had Paula Knudsen Burke on our side, a pro bono lawyer from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press who had successfully won cases like these. I was also fortunate to have editors who care deeply about holding agencies accountable to the public records law. They told me we’d fight the suit.

Burke and Reporters Committee fellow Annie Kapnick took on the case and eventually negotiated a settlement. SEPTA would give us the records, but redact home addresses and “nonfinal disciplinary actions.”

That meant we wouldn’t get to see earlier disciplinary actions against the executives, which could have explained why they agreed to leave.

Nine months after I first requested them, we got the records. They show that SEPTA gave the six executives generous deals.

In each situation, the men agreed to resign and get paid their full salary and health benefits for a certain amount of time after that.

The longest period was 13 months, given to Hopkins. This 13-month period was “intended to provide him the opportunity to … retire from the Authority’s service with an unreduced pension and certain retiree benefits,” the agreement said.

Rohan Hepkins, the former director of customer service, got five months’ pay after leaving in 2014.

Hepkins, who is the mayor of Yeadon Borough in Delaware County and now an assistant general manager at PATCO, said he could not speak about his departure because he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.

When I asked him about the redacted disciplinary records in his agreement, he said, “Maybe [SEPTA] interpreted it that way. I don’t interpret it as discipline.”

In the case of Nilesh “Neil” Patel, SEPTA’s former assistant general manager for procurement, SEPTA paid him $1,500 to hire a lawyer to look over the separation agreement. Patel was paid for six months after he left in December 2017. He did not respond to requests for comment.

I reached out to the biggest union representing SEPTA workers, Transport Workers Union Local 234, because I wanted to know, what happens when their workers lose their jobs?

They definitely did not get deals like this, said the union’s lawyer, Bruce Bodner.

He blasted the payouts as an “unbelievable double standard.” One that the union had no idea about — “until you uncovered it.” I suppressed a little smile over the phone. It felt good to hear him describe the impact like that.

“This is a public agency using taxpayer dollars as perks for people who … are getting sweetheart deals on the way out,” Bodner said. “These things should be disclosed to the public, and hopefully now it will be, because of your story.”