We would not say we’re glad, exactly, that the public is learning why and for what the Shapiro and Wolf administrations spent $368,000 on the services of private law firms.

We don’t believe disclosing the nature of the expenditures should have taken this long, or required the intervention of the state’s courts.

Nor do we find the finally-disclosed subjects of the consultations by attorneys in private practice to address why the numerous attorneys already on our state’s various payrolls couldn’t be used instead.

But, as the reporting by Angela Couloumbis of Spotlight PA detailed in the Monday edition of the Sun-Gazette, it took the news organization years and a substantial legal effort to secure the public’s right to know, as the governors’ offices argued the material was shielded from transparency by attorney-client privilege.

The dispute truly only highlights that some of our elected officials are too quick to spend our tax dollars and too resistant to the idea that the public paying those taxes should be adequately informed where their taxes are going.

A resistance, bordering on contempt really, for the public’s right to know reflected in the sparse comments offered by a spokesman for the Shapiro administration: “We are pleased that the Court has clarified the limits of these privileges and requirements and, as a result, ensured the Commonwealth can provide this material without running afoul of any such requirements.”

Are we really to believe that the state, before reaching agreements to pay these attorneys, couldn’t have clarified that as government entities subject to public records and disclosure requirements — the proverbial “right to know” — that the nature of the consultations would be public? And that these attorneys, whose legal wisdom apparently merited $368,000 of our tax dollars, likewise couldn’t anticipate that transparency should be an expectation?

While it is of course good that we now know the purported purpose of these attorneys’ consultations with state officials, we believe the public deserves clearer assurances that the governor’s office understands whose money state tax revenue really is and where their accountability really lies.