Sunday, July 16, 2006
A fresh splash of open government
Elizabeth Strother
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- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
- A doctor fights for a single-payer plan
From the RoundTable blog
Woo-hoo! Blacksburg Town Council members cast a vote of confidence in open government -- in you, dear readers -- by talking publicly, before anyone who showed up to hear, about who to name to fill out their ranks.
Woo-hoo! They named Mary Holliman.
OK, so Holliman's appointment was almost a foregone conclusion. As a respected Blacksburg planning commissioner, she was well known to council members. And as both a commissioner and a Blacksburg businesswoman -- she owns Pocahontas Press -- she is popular, apparently, with voters. She ran a close fourth for three at-large seats on council in May.
OK, so the Citizens First political action committee supported Holliman's appointment -- though, curiously, not her candidacy in the last campaign. With the town's most vocal citizen activists in her corner, and the public passion meter hovering around zero for other candidates, council members could talk openly about the merits of each without risk of alienating many voters.
OK, so making this appointment was easy. Discussing it in open session was easy. It will not always be so.
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Still, council members' decision to engage in the process publicly, though Virginia's Freedom of Information Act allows them to talk about appointments in closed session, is a good start.
It is a good start for newly elected Mayor Ron Rordam, whose decision to run for the office when longtime Mayor Roger Hedgepeth decided to retire created the council vacancy that Holliman will fill.
And it is a good start for a council heavily weighted now with members who have publicly pledged their ardent support for greater openness in doing the public's business.
They will be facing many far more contentious issues -- whether to grant a special-use permit to allow a new high school stadium comes immediately to mind. And the urge is likely to grow to hash out differences in private whenever a way can be found under the state's open meetings laws.
That seems to be a law of political nature.
And the FOI law leaves many avenues for closing meetings to the public that could well remain open. Legal advice from lawyers and personnel matters are two of the "black holes/loopholes/unholy stuff" that Frosty Landon cited to me when I e-mailed him, asking about exclusions from the open-meetings law that public officials can easily abuse.
Landon, retired editor of The Roanoke Times, is the director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government. His list of FOIA loopholes was long.
But "confidential discussion of new officials to vacant seats on elected public bodies" was the one that jumped out at me.
Last week's open discussion about filling a Blacksburg council vacancy should be so common a practice among local governments in Virginia that it would hardly be worth nothing. Yet it is so rare as to be worth singling out for praise.
"These are seats that people run for on election day -- so why secret deals for interim appointments?" Landon asked rhetorically during our e-mail exchange. "But Blacksburg is almost alone in the state in thinking that way!"
Of course, there are times when elected bodies do need to hold closed meetings to discuss personnel issues and hear legal advice. But the standard should not be whether a topic falls under some FOI exemption, but whether a closed meeting is both legal and necessary.
Indeed, why should people appointed to finish out the terms of elected officials ever be shielded from the kind of public scrutiny that people elected to office receive? It doesn't make sense. But it happens because, under the law, it can.
Are "secret deals" being made, as Landon suggests? Who knows? Perhaps. But I suspect many of these private discussions are held thoughtlessly, or with more concern for preventing prospective appointees' hurt feelings than for explaining to the public why it is getting the person it is getting as a representative.
And at times, I suspect, officials want to talk privately to spare the public -- and themselves -- a big hue and cry over controversial proposals that have little chance of coming to fruition. Or to contain the hue and cry over those that do.
I further suspect that the longer officials serve, and the more public storms they weather, the more tempted they are to hash out as much as they can behind closed doors. Decision making can be so much simpler that way.
Blacksburg's freshly idealistic council shouldn't go there.
I am reminded of a chat I had some years ago with the chief planner for Asheville, N.C., whose observations about his city remind me in some ways of Blacksburg. People moved to Asheville from all over for the "quality of life" and are protective of their environment, he told me. "We are very lucky to be in a place where people are very concerned. And we are very unlucky to be in a place where people are very concerned."
Participation can be such a hassle. But apathy is so much worse.
Elizabeth Strother is on the editorial board of The Roanoke Times.
