Sunday, March 15, 2009
Schools treat the public with trust, respect
Dan Radmacher
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From the RoundTable blog
Roanoke City Council members practically had to beg the city administration to open up the latest request-for-proposal process for the Countryside Golf Course to the point that council members themselves could see the proposals.
The public will remain in the dark.
Sadly, Roanoke's residents are used to that. Huge decisions about the expenditure of public money are made with hardly any public airing. Once a request for proposals is made, the city administration treats any responses like state secrets. The public can't be told who responded. No details of any kind are released until all the contracts are signed and sometimes millions of tax dollars obligated.
Ordinarily, not even the people's representatives on city council get any genuine input once the scope of the request is decided. A recommendation is made by a committee appointed by City Manager Darlene Burcham. She makes the final call.
That's how it worked with proposals for a city amphitheater. That was the process for a rejected proposal for the City Market Building and for past proposals for developing Countryside Golf Course.
Contrast that to what's happening at city schools. An RFP was put out for a controversial proposal to privatize the school bus system. The names of the firms that responded were made public. Their presentations were made in public. Some negotiation may go on behind closed doors, but, for the most part, the entire process will take place in the sunshine.
Virginia law allows the city's closed-door approach, but doesn't require it. The law allows the school system's open approach. In fact, I would argue that it encourages the school system's approach.
The Freedom of Information Act says, "The provisions of this chapter shall be liberally construed to promote an increased awareness by all persons of governmental activities and afford every opportunity to citizens to witness the operations of government."
What operation of government could be more important than the decision to spend tax dollars?
Burcham vigorously defends the city's handling of RFPs. Conducting the process in the open, she says, would harm the city's ability to negotiate and would subject the process to political tampering.
She is sincere in her beliefs, and finds the calls for more openness by this editorial page as baffling as we find the fact that council members themselves have been barred from seeing actual proposals received by the city before a decision is made.
But, sincere as she is, I think Burcham is wrong, and I think the approach by the school board and administration proves it.
In separate interviews, I asked Superintendent Rita Bishop and school board Chairman David Carson about the schools' approach. Both felt the openness was essential.
"It is important whenever possible to be really transparent," Bishop said. "You have to earn the public trust."
On a controversial issue like bus privatization, it's especially important to be as open as possibe for the sake of employee morale, Carson said.
"I can tell a bus driver, 'Everything I'm going to hear, you can hear.' Some people, I'm sure, won't be happy with the outcome, but it won't be because they think we're working behind closed doors."
Neither thought making the proposals public hurt the schools' negotiating position. If anything, Carson thought making the companies put their cards on the table strengthened the school system's position.
Bishop put it a bit more bluntly. She said that making proposals public doesn't harm negotiating strategy, "it only exposes you to the possibility that someone might disagree with your decision."
Carson said keeping proposals private doesn't take politics out of the process, it takes democracy out of the politics.
"That's what politics is," he said. "You deal with an understood set of facts. You have an informed debate. Eventually, you hope the best decision results."
Under the city process, there is no informed debate, at least not in public. The public has no way of evaluating whether the best decision has been reached behind closed doors. There's nothing to hang on to but trust in the city administration.
As Bishop says, such trust must be earned.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
