The public’s business, the people’s business, should be conducted in public, in front of the people.
This year, March 13-19 was Sunshine Week, an annual nationwide celebration of access to public information and what it means for citizens and their communities.
We didn’t do anything “special” this year for Sunshine Week – when it occurred, at least. Maybe we should have.
Our City Council has given us some indications recently that it might be developing a preference for working behind closed doors.
Last month, the council’s ad hoc subcommittee on healthcare met to address some of issues that came to the surface when Samaritan Health Services announced it planned to close Wiley Creek’s assisted living facility and replace it with residential substance abuse treatment.
City Council members formed the committee, which met with Samaritan CEO Larry Mullins in March. Mullins, in that meeting, decided not to talk openly about some of the ideas his organization has in the hopper because he isn’t ready to for them to go public.
We get that. Though a nonprofit, Samaritan is a business and it has interests in playing some of its cards close to its vest. That isn’t what should concern us.
In that meeting, though, councilors, Dave Trask and Greg Mahler, and a non-council member of the committee, Bob Dalton, indicated they thought a closed session would be good so the committee could hear more about these plans.
This is a terrible idea. Sweet Home’s concerns about its deficiencies in healthcare are public business. We certainly appreciate our council members stepping up to advocate for our town this way, something that we haven’t seen a lot of in recent years.
But the fact is, this is our business. And the public’s business should be conducted in public.
If Samaritan is considering projects that involve or would benefit Sweet Home, it should bring those things to the city through normal channels. At the right time – and Samaritan should get ahead of it when it can and ask the committee and council publicly about its ideas – then it should go to the appropriate committee or the council for support or approval as necessary.
The old “good-ol’-boy” style of government that used to take place in smoke-filled backrooms is still around. The only difference is the rooms aren’t smoke-filled today.
This kind of thing is a staple of the movie industry and real-life journalism across the country. After all, nothing ever goes wrong when elected officials have secret meetings with corporate officials. Right?
Wrong. Google “Bell, California” for a modern-day example of what can happen when government isn’t conducted in the open.
We aren’t insinuating here that in considering the possibility of a secret meeting of some type, our council members might be up to something nefarious. We’re confident they aren’t thinking about kickbacks or any of the other garbage that often is associated with this style of politics.
But it doesn’t look good, and the people are left in the dark about what their elected officials are up to. The bottom line is that if Samaritan doesn’t want to talk to the people about its plans, those plans are not the public’s business, which really means it’s not the council’s business yet.
Sometimes it’s necessary, when directly negotiating a price on a piece of property or disciplining an employee, who should enjoy some measure of privacy. That’s why state law allows for government bodies to meet privately in those kinds of situations.
However, Oregon has a unique provision that allows news media representatives to sit in on those executive sessions, as a watchdog against abuses of the law. The media are prohibited from reporting out of those meetings unless the committee, board or council strays into areas that are not exempt from public disclosure, but they’re still there to keep an eye on things.
Even so, doing the public’s work in private can come with a price. The council met in one of these closed sessions a couple of weeks ago and took no action after returning to open session.
The law prohibits us from reporting what was discussed, so we’ll have to see what comes out of it. Suffice to say, what they talked about could lead to interesting developments later – maybe even a serious error, that anyone in tune with local
politics might consider a big mistake.
However, the topic under discussion legitimately belonged in closed session under state law, and it’s up to the council members to decide what to do next.
But it’s public business done in the dark. If they move forward with this, at some point they will have to answer questions, and if they make the decision in a closed session, with no basis for the public to debate or consider the merits of the decision, there will be no good way for councilors to answer the questions that will be posed.
Secrecy hasn’t been a big issue with this council in recent years. We aren’t aware that they’ve been doing a lot of end runs around open meetings laws. We appreciate that and we hope they’re not frustrated by those laws, which are good for the public and good for government.
In their dealings with Samaritan and any other issues that involve the interests of Sweet Home as a community of people who elected them, council members need to remember that they’re not playing cards for themselves. It’s all of our interests that are on the line. When secrecy shrouds public administration, mistrust and bad blood – or worse– are the inevitable result.
We urge the council to embrace the open meetings laws and remember that each one sitting around the dais represents the people of Sweet Home, who also need information to do their job right as voters and as the council’s collective boss.