Keeping public business public
Given the choice between discussing a touchy issue in public or visiting about it privately, most elected officials would choose the latter.
It's more comfortable to be candid about assessments, to mull tough options, and to avoid embarrassing concessions when behind closed doors. Who prefers to expose preliminary thoughts or reveal a meager level of understanding of an issue unless they have to?
That's why there is the Kansas Open Meetings Act, a 32-year-old mandate that most discussions of public business by county commissions, city councils, school boards, and other tax-funded entities be held in public.
There are some specific exceptions for when the doors can be closed, such as visiting with legal counsel in a privileged client-lawyer mode or discussions about nonelected personnel. The reasons must be stated in advance of closing the doors.
Sometimes these so-called "executive sessions" are misused to discuss nonexempt items, often through ignorance but sometimes purposefully. Either way, these are violations of the law. Either way, their legal counsel should have made sure they were in compliance.
At the most extreme, members of a public body can develop a pattern of violations designed to prepackage issues and their results in advance of public meetings.
Officials can violate the act by gathering in prearranged groupings constituting a majority of a quorum to talk about public business. With Marion's three-member city council that number is just two.
They also can violate the law with a "serial meeting," where members of the body "meet" in telephone-tree conversations to discuss issues or even to poll each other about how they will vote in public. To many constituents, private talks by public officials may seem basically harmless. They appreciate the inconvenience caused by the open meeting law's prohibitions. What they don't see is the damage behind-the-scene wheeling and dealing can do, how bodies that meet this way lack full accountability.
Open meetings have been the law in Kansas for a generation because lawmakers, and the attorneys general who interpret the act, understand that the public has the right to know HOW decisions are reached, not just the final vote.
Public business needs to be conducted, warts and all, in the light of day with full public scrutiny. Elected public officials need to embrace that requirement rather than evade it. Voters need to pay closer attention to ensure it is being followed.
Your interests are best served when the process is transparent and accessible.
— Miami County Republic
