BRIEFS

The local government 'secret meeting'

Christine Robinson
Robinson

I grew up in a closed government environment in New York state. As a teenager, I would attend City Council meetings and shake my head at the process there. There was a conference room behind the dais, where the City Council would meet with the door shut before the actual official meetings. They would work out their votes, come into the formal meeting and act out the meeting and formalize the votes. They would allow public comment after it was all over.

It was a joke and everyone knew it.

Here, in Florida, we have the Sunshine Law and open government. Meetings are held in the open and the public gets to weigh in.  You have a right to know what is happening and, with recent statute changes, the right to be heard before a vote.

Access to government meetings is vital and a part of our state Constitution.

With the rise in technological capabilities and internet access, you can watch the meetings from your work or home, which allows you to not miss work or still take care of loved ones. You can email comments in.

Recently, however, we have seen an increase locally in a kind of informal meeting called a “workshop.”

The Sarasota County Commission does an excellent job in making sure that workshops are just as accessible and open as their regular meetings. The room is easily accessible, public comment occurs before the agenda begins and at the end, and the meetings are televised and anyone can watch at any time.

We have seen such workshops not quite as accessible on other bodies.

The Sarasota County School Board was notorious for these workshops. The School Board was so known for this practice that government gadflys stopped calling them workshops and started calling them “secret meetings.” The label was one the School Board could not shake.

The board members would end their meetings in the official School Board chambers, get up and leave the view of the television cameras and go to a small conference room on the third floor in a different building at the Landings to have their workshops. These sessions were not televised, allowed no public comment and no official votes were taken. But the superintendent and the board members could certainly figure out how a vote would go after everyone weighed in.

It was amazing to think that a government body in charge of a $770 million budget and the future of our children could do this. But they did.

At least they did until this year. Kudos to the school board for stopping this unscrupulous practice. Kudos also to school board member Bridget Ziegler for pursuing this issue from the minute she stepped into office. Her patience and persistence paid off for the public. We now get to watch the discussions, the dissension and the unofficial non-votes.

The Argus Foundation took a position on the school board workshop issue in March 2015. We asked for all meetings to be televised to allow for public input on all issues. It took a while, but the school board came around and we congratulate them for it.

However, we should not forget the past and it should not, in any way, be emulated.

The Sarasota City Commission is now contemplating how they will workshop items in the future. Its members are talking about where and how they are going to go about these meetings, whether public comment will be allowed and whether they should televise these meetings.

They have had notoriously long and late meetings, they are hoping that working on items in a workshop before the meetings will allow them to take the time on certain issues in a less formal setting. We commend them for trying to spend time on the hard items. But they should not fall into the past practices of the school board.

We encourage all municipalities and governments to ensure easy meeting access, fully televised meetings easily accessible during and after the fact and to allow public comment to ensure that access to government is not eroded. Government in the sunshine is messy but it allows us to understand and accept the result, whether we agree with it or not.

The city of Sarasota should make sure it adheres to the spirit of open government as a priority in these workshops. If it does, they can be a model for their peers and we can all watch their decisions and thank them for their work.

Christine Robinson is executive director of the Argus Foundation and was on the Sarasota County Commission from 2010 to 2016. Contact her at christine@argusfoundation.org.