Fifty people gathered in a Twin Falls meeting room on Tuesday to learn about Idaho’s open meeting and public records laws, in a session led by Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, Deputy Attorney General Brian Kane, and myself as president of Idahoans for Openness in Government. The workshop, co-sponsored by the Twin Falls Times-News, drew local government officials and employees, reporters, and citizens to learn together, through interactive skits, Q-and-A, stories, and presentations about the state’s key open government laws.

It was the 40^th such seminar IDOG has sponsored since 2004, all in partnership with Wasden; additional sessions are planned in October in North Idaho. There’s more info at IDOG’s website, www.openidaho.org. Also, KMVT-TV has coverage of Tuesday’s session and an interview with Wasden about it online here.

During the session, Wasden, Kane and I shared stories from our careers to help illustrate the various points about how these important laws work in Idaho, and there was a new one from Kane on Tuesday involving Times-News Publisher Travis Quast, who welcomed the crowd and served as host for the event.

It turns out that it was Quast who gave Kane his first introduction to the Idaho Public Records Act, when the two were both students at the University of Idaho. Quast was the advertising manager for the Argonaut, the student newspaper, and Kane, a former UI student body president, was in student government. Each year, students filled out evaluations rating their professors at the end of each class, but they never got to see them – unlike today, when various sources collect and post those online. So Quast brought a proposal before the student government to obtain the evaluations under the Idaho Public Records Act and publish them in the Argonaut.

His pitch to the Associated Students got a favorable vote, including hiring Lewiston attorney Chuck Brown to represent the students. They went to court and won – and even were awarded attorney fees. Then, Quast published the entire set of professor evaluations in a special insert in the Argonaut – complete with plentiful advertising. “He’s a savvy businessman – he really is,” Kane said.