Open Meetings

It’s March and it’s Sunshine Week. This year, from March 16 - 22, the American Society of Newspaper Editors is holding its annual national initiative to raise public consciousness on the need for open government. The name “Sunshine Week” is derived from the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s admonition that “[s]unlight is the best disinfectant,” describing his belief that an open government is more accountable to its people and thus less easily corrupted. As I write this post, various participants in the media community are similarly calling attention to the public’s right to know what their government is doing and why in order to improve their lives and better inform their communities. (See the Student Press Law Center, the Massachusetts Newspapers Publishers Association, and the Society for Professional Journalists for examples.)

Using freedom of information laws is a simple, and potentially powerful, way of obtaining information about the activities of federal, state and many local governments. You don't need to hire a lawyer, and no complicated forms are involved—requests can be made in a simple letter. And you don't need to be a journalist to share what you find with others who are interested in these issues; with nothing more than an Internet connection, you can post the information and make it available to anyone in the world.  read more »

Last week, the California First Amendment Coalition published an assessment of several open government reform bills in California's 2007 legislative session. The report shows that while there were some victories, several important reform proposals failed in the legislature or died on the Governor's desk. I wrote about one such proposal several weeks ago, S.B. 964, which would have added some teeth to California's open records law and closed a significant loophole in the state's open meetings law, that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to sign.

The California First Amendment Coalition reports:

The 2007 legislative session started with a host of promising bills that would have created more transparency and would have reversed recent judicial and Attorney General opinions permitting excessive secrecy. There were some successes and some disappointments. The major disappointment was the failure to overturn the 2006 state Supreme Court decision in Copley Press v. Superior Court, which effectively sealed all police disciplinary records. The major success was legislation creating more oversight and accountability for the UC Regents’ and CSU Trustees’ executive pay committees.

The full assessment can be found here.

(NOTE: The executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, Peter Scheer, is on the board of advisors for the Citizen Media Law Project.)

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to sign a bill, S.B. 964, that would have added some teeth to California's open records law and closed a significant loophole in the state's open meetings law which allows local government officials to hold discussions without public scrutiny through serial communications, such as e-mail, telephone, or intermediaries, provided the discussions do not result in a "collective concurrence" as to actions to be taken.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reported on the bill's failure yesterday and provides some additional background on the legislation, noting that "the measure had been eviscerated well before it ever reached the governor's desk." According to the Reporters Committee:

In its final form, S.B. 964 would have prohibited a majority of the members of a local agency's legislative body from discussing, deliberating upon or taking action on matters within its jurisdiction when the communications were not open to the public and were otherwise required by law to be so.

Tom Newton, general counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association and a lead supporter of the bill, said the original version of S.B. 964 had included a provision that would have authorized the state attorney general's office to review rejected open records requests. The original version would also have permitted a court to assess penalties upon a state or local agency in addition to legal fees if the court found the agency had acted in bad faith in denying a public records act request, Newton said.   read more »

Robert Ambrogi reports that:

The Massachusetts legislature's Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight today held a hearing on a number of open government bills and both the Senate and House chairs of the committee indicated support for measures that would add "teeth" to the law. In my capacity as executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, I testified in support of House Bill 3217, an MNPA-drafted bill that would allow fines against individual board members who violate the law and allow recovery of attorneys' fees by private citizens who bring actions to enforce the law.

Let's hope the Massachusetts legislature follows through on this. While state open meetings laws can provide useful leverage in the battle to get access to the workings of government, they typically lack any real enforcement mechanisms. Oftentimes the only recourse available when a meeting has been improperly closed is to get a "ruling" by a state official -- long after the fact -- that the meeting should have been open. Allowing fines and the recovery of attorneys' fees will add some real teeth to the Massachusetts act.

You can track the status of the Massachusetts bill at OpenMass.org.

 

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Tom Boney, publisher of the Alamance News, a weekly newspaper in Graham, N.C., was arrested and charged with trespass after refusing to leave the Burlington-Alamance Regional Airport Authority's monthly meeting.  According to the Burlington Times-News, Boney refused to leave the meeting after the airport authority voted to hold a private meeting to discuss a possible economic development project at the airport. 

Under North Carolina's Meetings of Public Bodies Act, all official meetings of public bodies are presumed to be open to the public.  The law permits closure only under nine enumerated circumstances.  It is unclear whether the airport authority met any of these conditions when it closed the meeting.  Even the sheriff who arrested Boney commented that he respects him for sticking to his convictions. "He's got a valid point about having access to public meetings," the sheriff told the Burlington Times-News.

Boney, who has long campaigned for open government meetings, is scheduled to appear in court on June 25 to address the misdemeanor trespassing charge.

UPDATE: The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reported that the district attorney's office dismissed the charge on July 20, 2007, saying the incident between Boney and the authority was a "civil matter."