ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 14, 1995                   TAG: 9503140111
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MAKING A MOCKERY OF OPEN MEETINGS

LOCAL ELECTED officials are an ingenious lot when it come to skirting the state's open-meeting law. Not, mind you, that they could get nailed very often with flagrantly violating the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.

No need to. In the 27 years the statute has been on the books, the General Assembly has thoughtfully provided 22 broadly worded exemptions. Almost any time elected officials feel more comfortable discussing a public matter out of their bosses' earshot, they can find language in the loopholes to justify it. Many of them are students of the Humpty Dumpty School of Good Government, believing ``When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.''

If not legally out of bounds, it's nonetheless an outrage that elected officials so routinely flout the intent of the open-meeting law. Some elected officials in the Roanoke area make not just a habit of it, but a career.

Granted, many meetings are convened in private for good reasons: sensitive personnel matters, for example. Even so, after reading this past Sunday's Horizon-section articles on the issue, can anyone doubt that governing boards in our region are grossly abusing the spirit of FOI when, all told, they shut the public out of meetings more than 650 times last year?

Granted, some boards are more offensive than others. The 112 ``executive sessions'' of Rocky Mount Town Council, the 105 held by the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors, make a sham of good government's and the FOI's tenet: that the public has a right to know its own business. Even so, Roanoke City Council (51 closed sessions) and the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors (59) were hardly paragons of FOI virtue. And members of other regional governing bodies weren't above hiding out from the public on the flimsiest of excuses.

These public servants, it's safe to say, won't be suffering heat strokes from too much government in the sunshine. Indeed, looking after one's own skin seems the motivation for many officials' fetish for ``executive sessions'' - a euphemism for making public decisions in secret.

Such sessions relieve elected officials of concern that they might get blistered for looking silly, asking dumb questions, letting their prejudices show, or generally exposing to public view the messy process of collective deliberation.

The General Assembly needs to close most of the loopholes it has provided in the FOI law. As Julie Lapham with Virginia Common Cause points out, government secrecy breeds cynicism and ultimately undermines the effectiveness of public institutions.

But local officials can't hide behind the legislature on this one. Virtually every one of them campaigned for public office on local issues. For them to conclude, once elected, that they have the right to discuss and decide local issues without the inconvenience of local residents' input or scrutiny betrays an undemocratic contempt for the citizens who are their employers. 


 by CNB