Southern Alleghenies Planning and Development Corporation (SAPDC) is a six-county agency set up by the federal government during the Great Society period in the 1960s. It remains a principal but little-noticed conduit for federal spending of all sorts into the region.

Eleven of members of its 17-person board are elected Commissioners from Bedford, Blair, Cambria, Fulton, Huntingdon and Somerset Counties. Until 2021, it had always noticed its meetings in accordance with the Sunshine Act and appointed  an open records officer to respond to Right-to-Know requests, which were apparently quite rare.

In late 2021, two sources close to SAPDC approached a local watchdog group with allegations that the agency had set up a new structure specifically to avoid public scrutiny into the impending flow of tens of millions of dollars of federal broadband infrastructure development funds. Among the allegations was a charge that Allegheny Broadband Inc, set up and registered by SAPDC as a 501(c)(3) charitable enterprise, was run by exactly the same staff members as SAPDC, from the same address, but was nonetheless masquerading as a private company, thereby shielding it from Pennsylvania's transparency laws — the Sunshine Act and the Right-to-Know Law. The initial chairman of ABI's board was Jim Foreman, chairman of the Blair County Republican Party. ABI had also gone to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC), where it claimed it was a private company "unconnected to any political subdivision", and walked away with a public utility operating license.

ABI, set up under the direct auspices of a government body, was now the sole arbiter of the broadband internet market in the region, the sources alleged. It simultaneously wrote policy for the industry while directly controlling the disbursement of government funds into private sector, thereby picking winners and making losers based on criteria the public would never see. Every dime of federal money, apparently, had been directed to a company owned by a person said to be close to the SAPDC leadership, even though that company specializes in building 5G cell towers, not the fiber optic hub infrastructure most industry experts say should form the backbone of any well-built broadband infrastructure. Armed with its own PUC operating license, ABI was even poised to compete in the marketplace itself, should it choose to do so.

Unfortunately, it was all true. SAPDC declined to respond to Right-to-Know requests from the Watchdog seeking information about federal spending through ABI, claiming ABI was a private entity exempt from public scrutiny. When the Watchdog appealed to the Office of Open Records (OOR), SAPDC doubled down, claiming that it too should be exempt from the Right-to-Know Law, despite being governed by elected county commissioners, as it was registered as a 501(c)(4) private non-profit entity with the IRS.

The Watchdog argued that with hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding pouring into infrastructure development, including rural broadband infrastructure, there is an overwhelming public interest in transparency and public oversight of the agencies directing that investment. The OOR agreed. It laughed off SAPDC's assertion that it was suddenly exempt from the Right-to-Know Law. As for ABI, the OOR called it an "alter-ego" of SAPDC, fully subject to Pennsylvania's transparency laws.

SAPDC, with the endorsement of all three Blair County Commissioners, is now spending tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money to fight the OOR ruling, thereby allowing SPADC and ABI to dole out federal dollars at they see fit, in secret, protected from the bothersome gaze of the public.

The John Galt Society asserts that a core tenet of political conservatism is accountable, transparent, and limited government that interferes as little as possible in the free market. It is abundantly clear that SAPDC and ABI have rejected these important principles of conservative governance, and have done so with explicit approval of the current Blair County commissioners.

Conservative? Not really, and Amy Webster has gone along with all of it.