Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 5, 1993 TAG: 9305050296
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Who could object to that? As a principle, it ranks up there with motherhood and apple pie.
The practice, however, is often another story. Elected officials sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to circumvent the FOI law.
A recent example was the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors' determination a couple of weeks ago to hold an entire session with the School Board behind closed doors, to discuss a proposed merger of the county's and the schools' finance and purchasing departments.
The supervisors' original justification for the executive session was "the protection of the privacy of individuals in personal matters not related to public business." When it became clear that "not related to public business" was . . . well, let's call it a bit of a stretch, the supervisors revised their justification. They would discuss specific information on salaries and reassignments of individually affected employees - which was odd, inasmuch as the merger itself had never been discussed by the two boards.
Come time to meet, the School Board refused to go into closed session. It recognized, apparently, that it would be illegal to close a general discussion of the proposed merger of the two finance departments.
The supervisors shut the doors anyway. When they emerged and went back into open session with the School Board, County Administrator Betty Thomas handed out a report marked: "Confidential: Prepared for executive session." However, there was nothing in the report that fit the exceptions to the open-meetings provision of the FOI law.
As Elizabeth Obenshain, editor at this newspaper's New River Valley bureau, observed in a recent column, this is just the latest case where the Montgomery County supervisors have retreated from public view to discuss nuts-and-bolts issues of public policy. They seem to be making not only a habit of it, but a fetish.
The Montgomery County supervisors aren't the only offenders. Members of the General Assembly and of other counties' boards and city councils aren't always pillars of FOI virtue either.
When public officials - the folks who make the laws and swear to uphold them - make a mockery of this particular law, they raise questions about their fitness to hold office. When open-meeting requirements are seen as a nuisance, an encumbrance, a challenge to their ingenuity in finding ways to get around them, it betrays an attitude of arrogant scorn toward the public.
Perhaps it's easy for elected officials to delude themselves into thinking they can best tend to the public's business without the inconvenience of public input, scrutiny - and, yes, sometimes outrage. Easy, but wrong, including in Montgomery County.
by CNB