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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Our View: Behind closed doors

The Spokesman-Review

As critical as it is for government to be conducted openly, there are times when elected officials have to get together behind closed doors to discuss certain sensitive matters.

If they are plotting legal strategy, for example, or deciding how much they’ll take, or pay, for real estate. For situations like those, Washington’s Open Public Meetings Act allows “executive sessions” where officials can converse in secret. They’re supposed to confine themselves to the narrow topic, though, and ultimately they must vote in open meeting.

But how do the rest of us know that they’re playing by the rules? The fact is, we often don’t.

That could change if legislation being proposed by two citizen-oriented state agencies becomes law during the session that opens next month in Olympia. The state attorney general and auditor want to require public bodies covered by the Open Meetings Act to record their executive sessions.

That might not prevent violations of the law when the doors are closed, but it would provide something that doesn’t exist now: a means of checking up when there’s reason for suspicion.

Agencies would be obliged to keep the recordings for two years. If they were accused of going beyond the limited conversations that are permissible during executive session, a judge could listen to the session and decide. The record wouldn’t be accessible for other purposes, and not even lawyers would be present when the judge reviewed it.

Still, as limited as the review would be, the Washington Association of Counties voted at their meeting last month in Vancouver to oppose it.

Ostensibly, public officials fear the recording option would discourage candor during executive session discussions and that recordings might get in the wrong hands, thus undermining the recognized purpose of executive sessions.

Those concerns don’t resolve the underlying concern, however. Assistant Attorney General Tim Ford told the Vancouver Columbian that he’d found “quite a few” reports of executive session abuse in recent months. Meanwhile, Jan Jutte, legal affairs director in the Auditor’s Office, is compiling a spreadsheet detailing the instances when executive session issues arise when the state audits public agencies. If local officials say it’s not a problem, her findings contradict that claim, she says.

It’s not as though there are strong disincentives for misusing executive sessions. Individual members of a violating body can be fined $100 each if it can be shown the violation was done knowingly. Courts can be asked to order the doors open, but that only begs the question. How do they know when that’s appropriate?

The recording option is uncomplicated and straightforward. It would enable the facts to speak for themselves. If that’s chilling, well, chill out.