By: Brad Flynn
On October 22, 2026, resident Michael Long published a website titled The Bath Record: Right-to-know costs, 2022–2026. It challenges the Borough’s published attribution of $202,323.10 in Right-to-Know costs to Long’s requests, appeals and related litigation, and it argues that the Borough’s own decisions drove much of that cost. After checking every figure against its accounting records and each vendor invoice, the Borough has corrected that total to $202,157.92.
Residents deserve a full answer. This page takes Long’s points in turn and answers them from the public record: Office of Open Records (OOR) determinations, court orders, Council minutes and meeting video, the Borough’s accounting records and vendor invoices, and seven years of independent audits. [Corrected October 25, 2026.] Where the Borough fell short, this page says so. Every source is linked so that you can check it yourself.
The Missing-Money Claims
For four years, Long has told Council and the public that money is missing from the Borough. Two examples from public meetings, both recorded in the approved minutes and on the Borough’s YouTube channel:
- June 10, 2024: “Mr. Long said we should consider the missing $200,000. The council erupted in discussion, requesting Mr. Long to clarify if money was stolen and by who. Mr. Long would not answer.” (minutes, video)
- August 10, 2026: “I’m also going to show you how over $100,000 just happened to disappear.” In the same comment he said a website with “all the evidence” would be posted. (minutes, video)
The October 22 website is that site. It does not allege fraud, theft or missing money. The word “fraud” appears in it only where Long quotes Manager Flynn. Its own closing caveat reads:
“Nothing here establishes anyone’s motive, waste, overpayment or financial loss.”
It also acknowledges that “the Borough maintains that no records were withheld.” The Borough agrees with both statements. What remains is a disagreement over how Right-to-Know costs should be attributed. The sections below address it.
The Huratiak Security Release
Much of the “missing money” claim has centered on a December 19, 2019 release of $86,170.53 in developer security held for Huratiak Homes, LLC. The records show where it went.
- The Borough’s engineer approved the release. The funds were transferred from the developer escrow account into the General Fund and paid out the same day on General Fund check #17119, payable to Huratiak Homes, LLC, for $86,170.53. The memo reads “Security Release per AIA dated 12.17.19.” The check cleared December 23, 2019. It was a pass-through: the money went to the developer.
- The Borough gave Long the transfer record, the December 2019 bank statement and a copy of the cancelled check on May 21, 2024, in response to his written questions.
View cancelled check #17119, front and back. Bank account and routing numbers, signatures and the endorsement are redacted. The bank processing date on the back is December 23, 2019.
The QuickBooks audit trail for this money shows several later edits to how the entries were coded. The amounts never changed. The Borough’s bookkeeper reviewed them and confirmed that “no actual money was moved.” The edits were a former office administrator recoding entries until they were recorded correctly. That is a bookkeeping history, not a missing-money history. It is also why the Borough changed how its books are kept, as described in the next section.
Independent Audits, 2019–2025
The Borough’s financial statements are audited every year by an independent CPA firm, Campbell, Rappold & Yurasits LLP, under Government Auditing Standards. The audits for 2019 through 2025 cover the years at the center of Long’s financial claims. Earlier years, including 2018, were audited by a prior firm. [Corrected October 25, 2026.] (audits on the Borough’s Financial Administration page)
| Fiscal year | Auditor’s opinion | Material weaknesses | Significant deficiencies reported | Non-compliance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Unmodified | None | Bank reconciliations not timely; invoice review not documented; time-sheet approval | None |
| 2020 | Unmodified | None | Bank reconciliations; time-sheet approval | None |
| 2021 | Unmodified | None | Bank reconciliations; time-sheet approval | None |
| 2022 | Unmodified | None | Bank reconciliations; auditor noted it was “fully corrected during the 2022 fiscal year” | None |
| 2023 | Unmodified | None | None | None |
| 2024 | Unmodified | None | None | None |
| 2025 | Unmodified | None | None | None |
An unmodified opinion is the cleanest opinion an auditor issues. The Borough has received one every year.
The Borough will not hide the weak years. From 2019 through 2021 the auditors found that bank accounts were not being reconciled on time, which is the same weakness visible in the old audit-trail entries Long has dissected. The Borough’s bookkeeping at the time was not where it needed to be. The Borough corrected it. In April 2022 the Borough engaged an outside bookkeeping firm. It reconciles the Borough’s accounts each month, and since May 2023 it has also prepared the treasurer’s reports Council receives at every meeting. The auditors found the problem corrected in 2022 and have reported no deficiency since. (The 2025 audit also reclassified $49,311 of 2024 streetlight project costs as capital assets. That correction increased the Borough’s net position.)
Audit Filing Note: The state filing deadline routinely comes before the CPA finishes the audit, so it’s normal.
How the Costs Are Counted
Long is right that the figure is not a bill to him, and the Borough has never treated it as one. It is the Borough’s own accounting of what it has spent on legal, bookkeeping, IT and audit work tied to his requests, appeals and litigation from September 2022 through July 2026.
The Borough checked its own numbers first. Before answering Long, the Borough traced every dollar of the total to a dated vendor invoice and to its accounting records. The review found errors in both directions. One 2023 IT invoice had been entered that was not Right-to-Know work. A 2024 figure for other requesters’ costs had repeated a different figure in error. Some bank fees had been left out. Another requester’s 2026 legal costs had also been left out, which means the published page overstated Long’s share of 2026 costs: it is 52% through July, not 83%. With every correction, the total moved by $165.18, or 0.08%. Each change is marked on the cost page with the date and the figure it replaced.
- How the costs are tracked. On August 7, 2023, Manager Flynn told Council in a public budget presentation that Right-to-Know expenses were being split out into separate legal, bookkeeping, auditing and IT lines. (minutes) Since April 2023 the Solicitor has billed Long’s requests and appeals to a matter number used for nothing else (Stevens & Lee matter 00217), and Special Right-to-Know Counsel has done the same since he was retained in November 2023 (Schnee matter 00093). The current Solicitor’s firm codes its Long time the same way. Long was not singled out. Another frequent requester had a separate matter number, and all other requesters were billed to a separate general Right-to-Know matter.
- How the 2022 figure was built. The Borough’s cost page originally called it an estimate. [Corrected October 25, 2026.] Before the separate matter number existed, the solicitor billed Right-to-Know work together with other Borough work. OOR accepted in 2023 that those invoices had no Right-to-Know subtotal, so the 2022 amount was carved out conservatively. The Borough then went through those invoices line by line and set aside each entry that concerned Long’s requests. The $4,554 is the total of those entries for September through November 2022. December’s work was paid, and counted, in 2023.
- Staff time is not in the total. The Borough Manager’s logged Right-to-Know hours are reported separately on the cost page. The cost of office staff time is not counted at all.
- What else the total includes. $7,552.60 of the total was for Long matters handled outside the Right-to-Know Law: $6,237.60 in legal fees and $1,100.00 in bookkeeping in 2024, and $215.00 in Solicitor time on a related complaint in 2025. They are counted because they arose from Long’s requests, and each appears in the itemized lists. [Updated October 25, 2026.]
- Bath’s ordinary cost is low. The Borough’s 2025 tracking list shows an average of $43.79 for each of the ten requests filed by other requesters, below the statewide averages Long cites. [Corrected Oct. 25, 2026: previously “the other ten requesters.” The ten are requests, not requesters.]
- The appeals tell the same story. Since 2008 the Borough has been a party to 12 appeals at the Office of Open Records. Long filed nine of them, all since 2022. In the 14 years before that, there was one.
2024 Costs
Long notes that the Borough attributed about 94% of 2024’s Right-to-Know cost to him in a year when he filed two requests. That figure came from the Borough’s own cost page, and it was too low: the page had listed another requester’s 2024 legal costs incorrectly. Corrected, Long’s share of 2024 is about 98%. His point about the number of requests is fair, but counting requests by the year they were filed misses where the cost came from. Most 2024 legal costs arose from litigation over a 2023 request (#20.2023, OOR AP 2023-1598), not from the two 2024 requests.
- Why the Borough appealed. On November 6, 2023, Council voted 7-0 to authorize legal action on OOR’s AP 2023-1598 decision. (minutes) Under the Right-to-Know Law, a record protected by attorney-client privilege is not a public record. OOR’s position was that the privilege protects legal advice but not purely factual information, so it ordered the Borough to go back through communications between its staff and its lawyers and release any factual content to Long. [Updated October 25, 2026.] The Borough believed privileged communications should be protected as a whole, and it still does. On September 14, 2026, Council voted 7-0 to adopt Resolution 2026-012, asking the General Assembly to clarify the law on exactly this point. (Resolution 2026-012) The court ultimately ruled against the Borough on June 24, 2025. Afterward, the Borough re-reviewed the 20 emails as the court required, reported the result to Long in writing on July 3, 2025, and released no additional text. The letter explained why: on re-review, “the entirety of the emails at issue are privileged, and no purely factual information can be released without revealing the content of privileged communications.” [Updated Oct. 25, 2026.] (court opinion)
- What happened during the litigation. Long filed a series of motions and briefs in the county cases, including a September 10, 2024 motion for protective order, sanctions and injunctive relief. On June 10, 2024, Special Counsel’s letter identifying case citations in Long’s filings that did not exist, or did not say what he claimed, was read into the Council record. When Solicitor Kratz noted that Long had admitted citing case law that does not exist, Long replied, “we all make mistakes.” (minutes, video) Long’s cross-appeal was quashed as untimely. On December 9, 2024, the court sanctioned two of his motions and imposed $1,000, which Long paid. Sanction order.
- Bills are paid after the work is done. The Borough’s ledger records legal bills when they are paid, usually a month or more after the work. The first 2024 entry, $26,703.53 paid in January 2024 (nearly a third of the year’s total), covered work done in November and December 2023. That was when the Borough filed its first two petitions and Long answered with objections and a counterclaim. Every 2024 entry, all $84,767.08, ties to a dated invoice on a matter number used only for Long.
- Nearly half was spent outside the Borough’s own court case [Updated October 25, 2026.]. Grouping every Long legal bill since 2022 by when the work was done, $81,514.82 of $182,565.60 (45%) was spent before Council authorized court action in November 2023 or after the court ruled in June 2025. That was answering Long’s requests, defending the OOR appeals he filed, and responding to his own county appeal. The rest falls in the period the Borough’s petitions were pending, and that period also includes Long’s own motions and another of his OOR appeals.
- The $61,874.87 point. Long points out that $61,874.87 was already booked by the end of August 2024, before the two sanctioned motions were filed on September 10. That is correct. The Borough has never said those two motions caused the year’s cost. The earlier balance reflects the rest of the litigation, including responding to Long’s earlier filings.
Itemized Bills
Long’s website asks residents to “ask Council to itemize the bill.” Here it is. The Borough has published every legal bill for Long matters from September 2022 to date: 82 bills and one credit, each with its date, firm, invoice number, matter number and amount, taken from the Borough’s accounting records. Task descriptions are left out because they are protected by attorney-client privilege. A companion list does the same for every IT, bookkeeping, auditor and bank charge. Together the two lists add up, to the penny, to the $202,157.92 on the corrected cost page. The legal totals by year and firm:
| Year billed | Stevens & Lee | Schnee Legal | Grim, Biehn & Thatcher | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | $4,554.00 | – | – | $4,554.00 |
| 2023 | $72,685.33 | $1,985.25 | – | $74,670.58 |
| 2024 | $57,404.35 | $27,676.68 | – | $85,081.03 |
| 2025 | $4,282.35 | $15,563.74 | $1,322.00 | $21,168.09 |
| 2026 | – | $3,268.00 | $61.50 | $3,329.50 |
| Total | $188,803.20 |
The figures include $6,237.60 for Long’s requests outside the Right-to-Know Law (2024) and $2,598.50 billed after the July 31, 2026 cutoff of the published total. Bills are listed by the date they were entered. The cost page counts them in the year they were paid, and only one bill, $5,923.65 dated December 12, 2023 and paid in January 2024, falls in a different year on that basis.
Account 259
Long’s website presents this exchange as its centerpiece: “He showed the account rows. The Borough called him a fraud. A year later it corrected itself.” Here is what the records show.
Account 259.00 in the Developers’ Escrow Fund is one account with two names. It was once titled “Huratiak Security” and is now titled “Bathview Phs II Security.” QuickBooks audit trails show the name an account carried when each entry was made, so the old name appears in the audit trail even though it no longer appears in the chart of accounts. The same is true of account 100.20, an earlier number for the Borough’s single escrow checking account.
Manager Flynn’s October 10, 2025 letter made two statements about these accounts. The first, that they do not appear in the fund’s chart of accounts, was correct. The second, that they were excluded from the report, was wrong. The entries were in the report all along, printed too narrowly to read. The rows Long held up came from the Borough’s own production. No account was left out and no record was withheld. The Borough corrected the statement in writing on October 20, 2026, re-ran all 31 reports at no charge with the columns widened, and checked every transaction against the originals.
Manager Flynn also owes residents a plain statement about how he answered Long. On October 10, 2025, he replied to Long by email in anger. He called Long a fraud and worse, and he has written to Long in anger at other times as well. Manager Flynn has been on the front line of this from the first request. For months on end he was the target of ridicule and false allegations, while he watched taxpayer money go to answering Long’s filings and most residents had no idea what the Borough was going through. Along the way came insulting emails, including one sent the evening before Easter 2023 that ended in a profanity, and public accusations, in online posts and at Council meetings, that he had embezzled money and committed felonies. At the August 11, 2025, Council meeting, the Borough Solicitor twice warned Long that his statements were defamatory (video). [Updated Oct. 25, 2026: previously “taunting emails, crude images and banter. Long seemed to be enjoying it.”] Manager Flynn was trying to work out how to protect the public from runaway costs under a law that gave him almost no power to stop them. That is why he was angry. It does not make what he wrote right, and he regrets writing to a resident that way.
Trash Payment Records (Item 7)
Long’s June 2025 request (#09.2025) did not identify an account by name or number. Item 7 asked for records of the First Northern Bank account “used as a resident payment location for Municipal Waste Payments,” from 2018 forward. Two Borough accounts fit that description at different times. The Borough read Item 7 as the Municipal Solid Waste Fund account, which was opened in April 2022. It produced those records after OOR’s Final Determination and considered the request closed. In October 2025 Long appealed to the county court, arguing among other things that the Borough had misread Item 7. After the Borough answered in November 2025, he took no further action in the case until August 2026.
In the meantime, in May 2026, Long requested the tax-account records again in a new request, #09.2026. The Borough processed that request, copied the records and held them for payment, as described in the next section. When Long revived his county appeal in August and September 2026, he argued that the same tax-account records belonged to Item 7 of the 2025 request. On October 20, 2026, Manager Flynn first told him those records were not responsive to the 2025 request and were being held under #09.2026. Later that afternoon, to resolve the appeal without further court time and cost, the Borough and its counsel decided to treat the records as responsive to Item 7 and release them at no charge: the tax-account audit trail, the 2018–2022 reconciliations and the sanitation account audit trail, 268 pages in all. The Borough also acknowledges that its 2025 reading was too narrow. Before 2022, residents’ trash payments were deposited to the tax account, as the Borough itself had stated on May 5, 2023. [Updated Oct. 25, 2026: previously said the Borough agreed “when Long pointed this out on October 20, 2026.” Added the history of the 2025 and 2026 requests and the county appeal, and the Borough’s first answer on October 20.]
Long offered to withdraw his county appeal once those records were produced. He made that offer at the courthouse on October 13 and repeated it in writing. He filed his withdrawal that evening.
The Unpaid Copy Fee
Long’s website says the Borough conditioned some records on an “$852 charge under another request.” That balance belongs to his separate May 2026 request (#09.2026). That request covered nearly nine years of records across every tax account and every developer escrow account: 187 separate line items, almost none previously produced, totaling 3,785 pages. OOR reviewed the fees on appeal (AP 2026-2665, September 8, 2026). It upheld the $45 in bank research fees as reasonable and directed the Borough to apply OOR’s standard copy rates: $0.25 per page for the first 1,000 pages and $0.20 per page after that.
| First 1,000 pages at $0.25 | $250.00 |
| Remaining 2,785 pages at $0.20 | $557.00 |
| Bank research fees (upheld by OOR) | $45.00 |
| Total | $852.00 |
|---|
OOR also confirmed that Long may inspect the records in person instead of paying for copies. The records have been copied and are being held. The determination was not appealed. On October 20, 2026, the Borough released 149 of those pages to Long at no charge: the 2018–2022 tax-account reconciliations, provided as part of correcting its response on the trash-payment account. That leaves 3,636 pages, and the balance is now $822.20 ($250.00 for the first 1,000 pages, $527.20 for the remaining 2,636, and the $45.00 in bank fees). It remains unpaid.
Rulings Against the Borough
Long’s website lists Borough positions that OOR or the court rejected. Several of those are fair, and the Borough accepts them.
- In 2022 (AP 2022-2675), OOR rejected the Borough’s redactions of vendor materials and ordered two account reports. They were produced.
- In 2023, OOR rejected the Borough’s argument that a sanitation-records search was too burdensome and ordered a good-faith search. The Borough searched and produced the records. Counsel re-reviewed 23 legal invoices whose first-pass redactions went too far, and OOR upheld the narrower redactions that remained.
- In 2023 (AP 2023-1083), OOR rejected the Borough’s argument that one of Long’s requests was “disruptive.”
- The Borough’s early workload forecasts, about 30,000 records in 2022 and 160 hours of staff time for the 2023 sanitation search, were estimates offered in support of the Borough’s objections, not measured time. Where OOR required a search, the Borough did it.
- In 2025, OOR held that standard QuickBooks reports are not new records the Borough would have to create. The Borough produced them, and OOR found no bad faith.
- On June 24, 2025, the court denied the Borough’s petition over the hiring emails and upheld further review for separable facts.
- The Item 7 and Account 259 corrections described above.
Long’s website also concedes points that went the other way. OOR upheld the Borough’s scope objection in 2022 and its privilege redactions in 2023. In 2025 OOR denied one of his appeals outright, and in 2026 it found the Borough’s response timely when he claimed it was late. A mixed record is what this process usually produces.
One thing the record is not mixed on is bad faith. Long asked OOR to find that the Borough acted in bad faith in at least four appeals (AP 2022-2675, 2023-1598, 2025-0522 and 2025-1943). OOR declined every time. In 2024 he made the same accusation to the county court in a motion for protective order, sanctions and injunctive relief, alleging an “ongoing campaign of bad faith, harassment, and intimidation.” The court denied that motion on October 23, 2024. On December 9, 2024, it sanctioned Long $1,000 for a “frivolous, vexatious, and bad faith filing.” No OOR determination or court order has found bad faith by the Borough. [Updated Oct. 25, 2026: expanded from “OOR has never found bad faith by the Borough.”]
Artificial Intelligence
Long notes that the December 2024 sanction order does not mention AI. That is true. The OOR record does. In its Final Determination in AP 2025-1943, OOR found “no evidence that the Commonwealth Court case cited by the Requester even exists” and warned that “AI routinely hallucinates the existence of case law or misrepresents the holdings of case law that exist to the user’s detriment.” When Long asked OOR to reconsider, OOR denied the request on September 30, 2025. It found that his request “contains multiple instances of citations or quotes that do not exist”: one citation led to a Rhode Island case, one case could not be found at all, and one Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision was described as holding something it does not. OOR cautioned him again. Ten days later, on October 10, 2025, Long filed his county appeal, which repeated that same misstatement of the Supreme Court’s decision in Pa. State Police v. Grove (Borough’s Response to Petition for Review, November 12, 2025). In AP 2026-2665, OOR found that a quotation Long attributed to a court decision “is not accurate” (Final Determination, n.10). Long’s October 22 website is itself hosted on ChatGPT’s site-hosting service. And on July 3, 2025, after the court ruled on the Borough’s petition, Long wrote to Manager Flynn, all of Council and the Borough’s lawyers: “you were spending almost $500 an hour for your legal team and yet lost to a $20 a month ChatGTP subscription.” That was his own description of how his side of the case was handled.
Conclusion
Long’s website closes by asking residents to “ask Council to itemize the bill.” The itemized list above is the answer. After four years, the records show this: a Borough that made bookkeeping mistakes in 2019 through 2021, fixed them, and has received clean audits every year. They show a Borough that won some records disputes and lost others, and corrected its own errors when they were pointed out. No auditor, OOR determination or court has found any money missing. Asked by Council in 2024 what “missing $200,000” he meant, Long would not say, and his own website now states that nothing in it establishes “financial loss.” [Updated October 25, 2026.]
The Borough remains committed to the Right-to-Know Law and to every resident’s right to use it. Questions about this page can be directed to Borough Hall, 121 South Walnut Street, Bath, PA 18014, (610) 837-6525.
Updated October 25, 2026. Factual changes are marked where they appear. Wording was also revised, with no change to any figure, in the opening paragraph, the audit section, the 2022-figure and privilege passages, the “nearly half” bullet, the AI section and the Conclusion. This page reflects the public record as of October 25, 2026. The Borough will correct any error of fact, but will not revise this page in response to further commentary.
Sources
- Office of Open Records appeal history: all appeals with the Borough since 2008. Docket pages: AP 2022-2675, AP 2023-1083, AP 2023-1598, AP 2025-0522, AP 2025-1943, AP 2026-2665.
- Northampton County Court of Common Pleas: sanction order, December 9, 2024; opinion, June 24, 2025; Long motion, September 10, 2024; order of August 28, 2024; Borough’s Response to Petition for Review, November 12, 2025.
- Borough Council minutes: August 7, 2023; November 6, 2023; June 10, 2024 (video); August 11, 2025 meeting (video); August 10, 2026 (video). Resolution 2026-012 (adopted September 14, 2026).
- Borough financial records: Right-to-Know cost page (corrected October 23, 2026); legal fees itemized by invoice; other professional services itemized; 2025 Right-to-Know tracking list; independent audits, 2019–2025.
