Bill Engle, writing for the Richmond Palladium-Item, has a good article on how Richmond City Council members circulated e-mails prior to a vote, specifically to avoid a public meeting, resulting in a successful effort to eliminate funding for Richmond’s Human Rights office. When councilman, Clay Miller, suggested that Republican members of the council caucus to discuss the issue, Council President, Bruce Wissell discouraged such a meeting since it would trigger the state’s open meeting laws. Instead, they planned their action through a series of e-mails and successfully blindsided advocates of the human rights office.
Ah, those pesky laws requiring elected officials to consult with those they rule. Fascist socialist restrictions on the elected elite!
I know that a lot of people were upset about this action. Bruce Wissel has questioned the need for the local Human Rights Commission for a long time, as anyone who has even half-way read the Palladium-Item in the last several years can tell you. Several weeks ago, I was told that Wissel and Miller knew that they had the votes to de-fund the office, and that they were going to do it within the rules, but in such a way that there would be little opportunity for public comment. Looks like the Palladium story confirms what I was told.
Doug, I know you have done a significant amount of research into intellectual property rights as they relate to changes in technology.
This raises some of the same issues. As new tech emerges, like video conference, Google Wave, and other collaborative tech, how do public meeting and disclosure laws get applied? Are laws and rules written in such a way to deal with emerging collaborative technologies, or do these technologies provide a way for legislatures everywhere to circumvent a basic tenet of representative democracy: open access to those that govern on our behalf?
In some respects, the public access laws have worked — the newspaper got access to the e-mails. But there have always been work arounds – e.g. serial meetings in numbers that don’t trigger the public meeting laws. With e-mails, it makes it a little easier.
A scenario I’d like to see is with respect to video conferences – it’s not a physical meeting, but usually there isn’t any document left after the fact subject to the public records laws either. I think in various places there has been specific legislation to the effect that video presence isn’t allowed to be counted for quorum purposes. I wonder if they can say that attending virtually doesn’t count for a quorum but does count for public meeting requirements.
Can someone explain to me what a “Fascist Socialist” is?
I see this term more and more often these days. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was pretty sure they were mutually exclusive.
They are. It’s something that gets said by someone who is historically illiterate but wants to call people names.
Can someone explain to me what a “Fascist Socialist” is?
It’s a backdoor way to ‘prove’ that no one can become an ‘extremist’ except starting from left of center on the political spectrum.The assumed axiom is :’The right” is always right. Jonestown comes to mind.
Concerning the open door law: it is a very good idea but in the time of growing use of technology it is leaving many concerns. If a council/board/commission member sends out a notice or draws attention to an article such as the one above they have broken the law in a technical sense. Intentional efforts to avoid “open” situations and “public access” requirements is not acceptable but there are many times the letter of the law is broken simply by trying to operate in an efficient and meaningful manner that is common practice in business world. Failure to enable use of a world of increasing availability of technology needs to be addressed.
I understand that there are concerns that current “sunshine” laws don’t take technology into account. In this instance, however, it appears that there was an effort to (legally) circumvent those laws by not meeting together as a group in person, thus avoiding public comment and scrutiny. It also appears that there was one specific area of the city budget, the (de) funding of the Human Rights Commission, rather than the entire budget that was the reason for the e-mail exchange. The council members in question had reason to believe that eliminating funding for the commission would spark a public outcry. They found a way to avoid that, or to at least delay public comment until they knew they had enough votes to defund the commission. There was no meaningful exchange between the council members and the citizens on the issue.
Being informal and secretive may fly in private enterprise, but it is rarely good for open government. Following the rules that require pulic disclosure and comment may be unwieldy at times, but those rules are necessary.