Commissioners Close Doors On Land-Use Issues For Second Time This Year They Decide To Exclude Public From Deliberations

For the second time this year, Spokane County commissioners decided Tuesday to exclude the public from their deliberations on a pair of land-use issues.

Commissioners Phil Harris, Kate McCaslin and John Roskelley agreed to meet in private to discuss two preliminary plats and zone changes denied by the county’s hearing examiner and appealed to the board.

Only assistant county attorney Rob Binger was allowed to attend the meeting.

Commissioners debated whether to close the meeting during their weekly briefing session, which was open to the public and held before they went behind closed doors to deliberate the land-use issues.

McCaslin said she thinks citizens lose little when she and her colleagues deliberate in private.

“People will say they don’t know what we think about an issue,” McCaslin said. “But all they have to do is read the findings of fact and conclusions of law to know what we think.”

The findings of fact and conclusions of law are highly technical documents that state the legal opinions on which commissioners based land-use decisions. They rarely contain dissenting comments or elaboration, so how and why commissioners reached their decision remains a mystery.

McCaslin and Harris also said they saw good reasons for deliberating in private.

Doing so avoids giving either party in a land-use dispute ammunition that it might use in a later lawsuit against the county, McCaslin said.

It also keeps sometimes acrimonious debate between commissioners behind closed doors, Harris said.

“That’s the time we should be yelling and screaming at each other, instead of what happened last week,” said Harris, alluding to a heated exchange between Roskelley and him at a Jan. 25 meeting.

Commissioners closed another land-use deliberation meeting in January.

Binger has advised commissioners that a section of the Washington Open Meetings Act gives them authority to hold such closed meetings.

That section states a government board may close a meeting “on a quasi-judicial matter between named parties as distinguished from a matter having general effect on the public or on a class or group.”

The Open Meetings Act also gives them the option of holding the meetings in public.

The act prohibits commissioners from taking a vote in such closed meetings but allows them to debate the merits of proposals, discuss ramifications and talk about fine points of the law.

Appeals from the hearing examiner qualify as quasijudicial matters because commissioners are acting as a judge between two sides.

The Spokesman-Review’s attorney disagrees that commissioners have legal authority to hold such meetings in private.

Attorney Duane Swinton sent Binger a letter objecting to the process after last month’s closed meeting.

Previous case law makes it clear that such deliberations must be made in public, Swinton said in his letter.

McCaslin and Harris suggested Tuesday that they would continue to close such meetings to the public until someone challenges the practice in court.

“I’d like someone to do that, and I mean in a friendly way,” said Harris, who touts himself as a champion of open government. “I’d like to settle this thing once and for all.”