Public Office, Private Agendas: The Battle for Government Transparency

“Whenever the people are well informed they may be trusted with their own government.” Those words from Thomas Jefferson are not likely to be framed and placed on the wall of most local government meeting rooms. An informed public is something to honor in speeches. It is not something many of our elected officials actually seek.

An informed public is a dangerous public. An informed public may be a more participatory public. It may mean citizens who want to know more about what is done and why. It may be a threat to those who have held office for decades.

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Elected officials are chosen to serve, not to rule from behind closed doors. When decisions are made in the shadows – whether by restricting public comment, withholding information or avoiding scrutiny – it is not governance; it is control. A government that hides from its people is a government that has something to hide.

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Lately several governing bodies, especially the county Board of Commissioners, have seen citizens speaking out for greater transparency and government accountability. In many instances the calls for greater transparency have been resisted.

At the county commission meetings an almost meaningless concession was made to allow audio recordings of the meetings to be released in 72 hours rather than 14 days. This was done even though the recordings are not going to morph into something different as they age on the county shelf.

Then, in just a few weeks, new restrictions were imposed on public comment at those same commission meetings. The meaningless give was followed by the more meaningful take.

Why after all these years of dealing with the public without such restrictions were they suddenly seen as necessary? Could it be that the public comment period at meetings of late was embarrassing to the county commissioners, who are used to running their meetings without interference? Could new rules on comment at meetings be related to the increasing use of comment to push for greater transparency?

Let’s take a look at just a few recent instances of push-back against transparency in local government across the county.

When a citizen wants to video a Planning Board meeting in Ocean City, she meets resistance, but doggedly sets up a tripod and uses her phone to video the meeting, a process that should cause no disruption to a meeting’s flow.

When reporters want to ask questions of county employees as high up as department heads, they are told to see the county administrator, who will facilitate the encounter. A formal gag rule is not needed, just a process that lets employees know that someone is aware and watching. Public employees speaking freely with the press is not a pathway the county wants to be encouraged.

When a new rule is put in place in Stone Harbor that prevents employees from audio-recording a meeting in which their supervisor is present, we see the addition of a restriction in an environment that is experiencing a great deal of employee turnover. Happy employees would not have sought to record those meetings.

The low morale among Stone Harbor borough employees is so noticeable that one citizen said recently at a council meeting that he has stopped a long-standing habit of going to borough hall to transact business in person. He did so, he said, because the center of local government has become a “cold and unfeeling place to enter.”

And then a new digital stopwatch appears on the dais for county commission meetings to limit the time for public comment, along with new restrictions that give the council the ability to end comment if, in their view, “comments are repetitive, truculent, slanderous, violate an individual’s privacy, or are done in a manner that interrupts the fair and efficient operation of the meeting.”

What changed? Why, after all the years that the Board of Commissioners operated without these restrictions, were they suddenly necessary? The most obvious change is in the members of the board itself. Now they see public comment as so disruptive that a digital timer counts down the minutes, as though they were students waiting for the bell ending class to ring so they could high-tail it out of there.

Several county towns impose time limits on public comment, but few use so visible a countdown device. What is the message being sent here?

When local governing boards freely put resolutions up for vote that never appeared in the agenda released to the public, should we not challenge the need for that practice? By voting on items that were not on the agenda released just 48 hours before the meeting, the governing body is effectively saying it does not matter that the public was unaware it was going to vote on this. It does not matter that they had no chance to show up and comment.

Stone Harbor recently used a resolution added to the agenda at the meeting to separate from its police chief, who had served the borough for 30 years. There was no formal good-bye. No thank you for your service. No comment or public explanation to the public. There was just a late addition of a resolution and general release from litigation.

This is a practice that has become commonplace in some governing body meetings in the county. Resolutions are added for a variety of reasons, seldom because they are legitimately time-sensitive and often because they allow the governing body to take a public vote that the assembled public knows nothing about.

This vote to add an agenda item is allowed under the Open Public Meetings Act, but it is intended to be reserved for emergency items where a delay has potential for public harm. It is not intended to be a mechanism to allow votes on items the governing body simply does not want to tell the public about in advance. If not a technical violation of the rules of adequate notice, it is clearly a violation of the spirit of that principle.

The list of ways in which entrenched government bodies avoid their responsibility to keep the public informed could go on.

In this county there is a great deal of room for improvement regarding the task of informing and listening to the public.

No place is that more apparent than with the county commissioners. It is time that body establishes a real commitment to public information and participation, even at the risk of having to put up with some public comment that is off track and too long. Change would send a positive signal to the municipalities.

Unfortunately, the county commissioners appear more intent on resistance than transparency. That means that the public needs to continue to demand change even at the expense of confronting arrogance on the dais.

Quotes From the Bible

For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Luke 8:17

Explanation: Truth will always surface. Attempts to conceal information or avoid accountability are ultimately futile. The public’s demand for openness in government is not just a civic duty but a moral imperative.