Do citizens have the right to speak at public meetings?

Open meeting laws exist in every state to ensure that citizens have access to public officials’ decision-making gatherings. But do these citizens also have a right to actively participate during these meetings?

That question would be up before the Florida Supreme Court… if the Court would agree to hear it. But it wont.

From the Miami-Herald:

“The 1st District Court of Appeals in March rejected claims by two citizens, one now deceased, that Pensacola’s Community Maritime Park Associates had violated Florida’s open meetings law by refusing to let them speak.[...] The Supreme Court on Oct. 13 also declined to take up a similar appeal from a 1st District ruling in a case involving the Alachua City Commission.”

What do you think? My first impression is that citizen participation is the spirit behind open meeting laws, and that local governments should welcome citizens that want to be engaged. But should the law demand that governments mandate that public participation be allowed?

Mayor exceeds open meetings requirements in South Carolina

Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin in South Carolina changed the meeting times of the Columbia City Council meetings. His goal: to allow more citizens to participate. It worked.

Since 2005, the council has met during working hours, making it difficult for some to make the meetings. The mayor pushed to change the meeting times to accomodate more citizens, and also considered the fact that Wednesday is a big church night for his consituents, chosing Tuesday instead.

The first meeting at the new time was Tuesday, October 19, and it was a success. The mayor’s reaction: “Wow. The room is packed.’ One woman remarked that it was the first time she had been able to make a meeting, and she planned on becoming more involved.

The South Carolina Open Meetings Law is the law that governs public meetings in the state, which are defined as a quorom of public officials convening to decide the public business. The law, however, is the minimum. In order to fully embrace the spirit of open government, officials need to follow the lead of Mayor Benjamin, who understand that it is important to collaborate with citizens.

Wisconsin AG embraces open government, says editorial

A recent editorial praises Wisconsin for its open government–in particular, the attitude of of Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen.

The author of the piece notes that the Attorney General Van Hollen has actively worked to improve citizen access to and understanding of public records and public meetings.

He has the right attitude towards open government, too, writing “A citizen’s access to public records and meetings of governmental bodies is a vital aspect of this principle [of 'government of the people, by the people, for the people…'].” The Department of Justice website hosts a video of the DOJ’s 2009 public records seminar, and the DOJ is offering a series of free seminars and video conferences to promote public awareness of and compliance with Wisconsin’s open meetings and public records laws. (These can be found here.)

According to Sunshine Review, the state of Wisconsin does extremely well on the material it discloses online. We give Wisconsin’s website an “A+” transparency grade, which means it posts all of the items we recommend on our 10 point transparency checklist. At the local level, however, Wisconsin counties only get a “D” transparency grade average.

What are your experiences with transparency in Wisconsin?

Ordinance to limit open meetings act fails

Last Friday on #FOIAchat, our live Twitter chat on Freedom of Information Act issues, the Dover, New Jersey open meetings ordinance came up. The ordinance required citizens to turn over videos of open meetings. Why? As the Mayor stated, “With today’s technology, people can edit, tape, doctor or alter the real intent of what’s discussed.”

(It is true that video tapes can be altered. So can basically anything else that’s recordable.)

But last Tuesday the Board of Alderman rejected the ordinance.

Alderman Pat Donofrio, the only member to oppose the ordinance at its introduction two weeks ago, was pleased with the proposed law’s defeat. Not only did he see the law as unnecessary, by more seriously, Donofrio also saw it as a “reactive response” by Mayor James Dodd to restrict recording the meetings by certain residents.

Edward Correa, founder of the group Dover Democrats For Change, said it was nonsensical to expect citizens to hand over recordings. It was also harmful to open government. “There were too many regulations that would have discouraged people from taping the meetings.”

Luckily, this ordinance was defeated. But governments and officials keep trying to defeat open records and open meetings laws. In Texaschallenge the constitutionality of the Texas Open Meetings Act. Let’s stay informed and make sure attempts like these to limit our information don’t make it very far, and that we have officials like Alderman Donofrio looking out for transparency government.

Citizens work wonders with information on their side… when they aren’t being kicked out of public meetings

What can citizens do once they have government information?

In Bell, California, three senior city officials were making lavish salaries. The Chief Administrative Officer, Robert Rizzo, was making $787,637 for running the city of less than 40,000. When citizens found out, they were rightfully outraged and their anger translated into the resignation of those three officials. Now activist groups are calling for the resignation of 4 out of the 5 city council members. These positions are part time, but the council members are making more close to $100,000.

“It’s showing that the residents are ready and willing to fix this problem and they’re going to move forward until they get justice and get a government that works for them,” said Christina Garcia, the head of one of the activist groups involved in organizing upset citiznes. The group is calling for open records and an exhaustive audit of the city’s finances. Coincidentally, the city gets an “F” on transparency using our 10 point transparency checklist.

Citizens armed with information are fully-vested with the power they need in order to keep their government accountable. But what about those instances where information is kept from citizens?

Mike Gatto, California State Assemblyman, avoids cameras and answering question. But that’s putting it lightly. One man representing the assemblyman who can only kindly be described as “overly aggressive” in his tactics kicked a journalist out from a public meeting in a public library. Less than 30 people attended the meeting. And that’s how many would find out what really happened in that meeting,

Police at the scene threatened to arrest the journalist if he didn’t leave. Of course, the journalist was the last person that needed to be threatened by police. Perhaps the police should have threatened the assemblyman and compelled him to acknowledge California’s open meetings law.

Several things I’ve learned through #FOIAchat, our weekly Twitter conference on Freedom of Information issues, come to mind. First, video cameras will bring out the worst in public officials and their staff as far as secrecy goes. But few will object to, or notice, a voice recorder. For many reasons, video is far superior to just voice recording, but it is better than nothing. Second, the fact that Mike Gatto is acting like a diva is a story in itself. If this were a special on VH1, it would be understandable why he wouldn’t want unexpected cameras. But as an elected official, paid by taxpayer money, he has no right to exclude journalists (and thereby exclude his constituents) from public meetings. This is a story on it’s own right, and had he let the journalist in the meeting, the journalist probably wouldn’t have found anything as worthy of reporting as Gatto’s power trip.

Lastly, people are becoming a part of government accountability, and officials should embrace this and learn to work with citizens instead of trying to push us out. We’ve talked about the benefits to governments and citizens alike to letting cameras into open meetings. Officials can benefit by having justifications for their decisions available and they can also see a decrease in Freedom of Information Act requests. The benefits to citizens are obvious.

It won’t work to keep us out, we’re already in. Officials need to get with the times and include us in the conversation, or suffer the wrath of informed citizens.

Open records, open meetings, open government

Over at the WikiFOIA blog, they’re talking about the pros and cons of open meetings:

This issue of justifying the recording of open meetings came up during one of our weekly Friday FOIA chats. During this chat, the participants of FOIA Friday also developed a laundry list of reasons most of which help to overcome the justifications of the Chicago area school boards [who have stopped posting meetings].

The blog includes a long list of reasons governments should archive their videos online. The reasons taken together should be enough to help governments overcome anxiety about making their meetings easily accessible.

Be sure to checkout WikiFOIA for updates on Freedom of Information Act issues and legislation. Also, join us on Twitter every Friday from 2-3 EST for #FOIAchat, our live conference on FOIA issues and the original source of the discussion on open meetings.

Texas open meeting laws and new media

Last Tuesday, May 11, the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee spent nearly three hours discussing how the emergence of social media has changed the way governmental bodies conduct public business.

These new tools can be used by elected officials to better communicate with constituents. But as Keith Elkins, a former Capitol reporter and now executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, noted, elected officials could also use their cell phones, Blackberrys, laptops, and personal computers to communicate with one another in secrecy, outside of the state’s open records law and theTexas Open Meetings Act. He isn’t the first person to worry about this. Jason Stverak, president of the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, worried earlier this month about the lack of archiving in new media: while public officials are more available to their constituents, the are also more available to each other through means that circumvent open meetings law.

Senate State Affairs Committee chairman Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, recommends the Texas Legislature address how elected officials use the Internet to assure the public that no one is using the technology to violate the state’s Open Meetings Act or the Public Information Act. He also said public officials should not live in fear of being accused of violating the Public Meetings Act if they use electronic devices to communicate with others.

I wrote last week about the being behind municipalities using taxpayer dollars to sue Texas in order to “gut” the state’s open meetings law. Last year, four cities and some 20 local officials from across the state filed a federal lawsuit, supported by the Texas Municipal League, arguing that the penalties for violating the Act are harsh and unconstitutional. These penalties includ six months in jail and a fine of up to $500.
“We’ve got some good folks who are threatened with jail by innocent remarks or e-mails” said Amarillo Mayor and League president Debra McCartt.

Of course, there are consequences for a law that isn’t strict. The Illinois FOIA improvements that went into effect this year have sought to remedy lax execution of the state’s open meetings and records laws by setting up strict deadlines for compliance, and severe penalties for failing to do so.

It seems the answer is for Open Meetings Laws to explicitly state what is and isn’t acceptable, and to make clear what the exemptions to the law are. These laws need to address changing technology. It isn’t fair to officials for them to be unclear about whether their Tweet breaks the law, and it isn’t fair to citizens to be unable to access a Tweet relating to public business. Lastly, breaking the law needs to come with penalties that are strict enough to induce compliance.

Join us tomorrow on Twitter from 2-3 Eastern Standard Time to talk about Texas Open Meetings Law and open meetings laws in your state. Use hashtag #FOIAchat to talk to other transparency advocates about questions you may have or your experiences with open meetings. (If you can’t make it, our discussions are always archived.) For a topic schedule, look here.

Everything’s bigger in Texas, including attempts to exclude taxpayers

Taxpayer money helps fund a lot, more than taxpayers know about. Cities use taxpayer-money to lobby states and the federal government (a practice called “taxpayer-funded lobbying“). Anything that government does should be open to the government, that is our stance. Unfortunately, this practice is anything but open and there is little information available on it and taxpayer-funded lobbying associations.

And taxpayer-funded lobbying associations are making it so that government is less open. In Texas, the Texas Open Meetings Act is under assault. The Texas Municipal League is behind an effort to get cities to sue the state in order to weaken the open meetings law.

To put this into perspect: Texas citizens are funding an organization, which is encouraging Texas cities to sue the state, which are suing the state using the money of Texas citizens in order to prevent these citizens access to government meetings.

We’ll make sure to continue following this story. And make sure to tell us what you think.

Maryland transparency woes?

Yesterday, I wrote about the strides being taken in improving Maryland’s transparency and integrating technology into the state’s plans. But Maryland doesn’t have a completely pristine record on the matter, according to some.

An editorial in the Washington Post this week called the transparency in Maryland “fake transparency.” The author of the editorial has experience with Anne Arundel, which he recognizes as having “an award-winning Web site [that] happily provides tons of noncontroversial information.” The author had experience with Maryland Public Information Act requests, and in turn faced intimidation and incompetence from the county’s staff on several ocassions. Another problem he noticed was very lax compliance to the Maryland Open Meetings Act, like the lack of a public notice to alert the public of special meetings and a lack of responsiveness from county officials when the problem was brought to their attention.

The Post article concludes with the recommendation that local governments adopt legislation similar to the federal Public Online Information Act of 2010, which would make all documents subject to a Public Information Act request be online and free to the public from the moment of their creation.

I’ve also written about Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s mixed transparency record. The governor, like the state of Maryland, has some people lauding his transparency accomplishments, and others saying they are less than perfect. Apparently, his lack of follow-through on his transparency promises has landed Jindal the title of 4th Worst Governor in the Country. That is the consequence of not addressing transparency concerns.

Whether the problems found in Anne Arundel are generalizable to the rest of the state is yet to be determined. However, good transparency recommendations should be addressed, regardless of their premises. Our friends at the Sunlight Foundation have been saying Public = Online for awhile, the sentiment echoed by the Post editorial, and this may be the opportunity for Maryland to lead the way.

Officials in and around Vermont stand up for open government

We always like to encourage citizens to get angry and demand the information that is due to them, because the government will hardly ever do it on its own. Usually, citizens have more at stake in demanding information than public officials, who often see open records and open meetings laws as burdens.

In and around Vermont, however, public officials stepped up to the plate to make government open.

When the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) scheduled a closed-door meeting with public officials to discuss the recent safety problems at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, it was congressional leaders in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont who sent letters and made calls to NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, expressing their discomfort over the secret meeting and asking him to consider making the meeting open. Vermont officials expressed their concerns, as well. Attorney General Deb Markowitz called plans for the closed meeting “legally questionable and ethically repugnant,” given it dealt with public health issues. Senators Bernard Sanders Patrick Leahy and Representative Peter F. Welch, issued a joint statement saying they were “committed to open and transparent government and to honoring both the letter and spirit of Vermont’s open meeting laws,” and urged the commission chairman to move the meeting back to Vermont and comply fully with Vermont’s open government law. “Avoiding Vermont’s open meeting laws by holding this meeting in New Hampshire will only add to the growing public skepticism about the handling of oversight at Vermont Yankee, and could curtail participation from Vermont officials,” they wrote.

The congressmens suspicions are well founded, as Vermont citizens do not have the most positive view of the openness of their government. An editorial appearing in the Burlington Free Press makes the charges that Vermont suffers from a lack of transparency:

* Too many exceptions to the Vermont Open Records and laws, making the laws “anemic” and “meaningless”
* A culture of secrecy is rampant in the state
* A reliance on poor excuses to justify not holding open meetings

The author goes on to state (brilliantly, may I add) that “If public officials feel uncomfortable conducting their business in public, then they should reconsider their government careers.”

The public officials who stood up for citizens by demanding open government seem to be in the right careers. Any official that recognizes that information to citizens comes before any other interest deserves accolades, though we hope someday this will be such a common characteristic among those who represent us that it wont even be worth noting.

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