Let me first get the low comedy and cheap shots out of the way by answering a question friends keep asking since my video showdown with Spokane County deputies made news.

Yes, from firsthand experience, I can report that there is a difference between security in the Soviet-era Kremlin and today’s Spokane County Courthouse. At the Kremlin, once you pass through the metal detector and your camera’s been X-rayed, the head of the KGB doesn’t roust you about your credentials while you’re trying to photograph the Politburo. Ha. Ha.

I’m a funny guy. In my business I often use humor to make a point, but I’ve blundered onto a serious piece of turf here.

Let’s start with Mr. Ross Kelley the Road Builder. Kelley is a traffic engineer. Kelley has a bold plan to build a super highway along the Bigelow Gulch Road. He sees it as a swell way to provide a temporary solution to the lack of a north-south freeway. His plan is to build it in small increments – see the “intersection improvement” at Bigelow and Argonne – without a full and frank discussion of what the project actually is.

In the words of Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Kelley’s ignorance of the law governing public meetings is vividly captured on videotape for all to see. It seems to my neighbors and me that he’s also ignorant of the laws designed to protect the environment, wildlife and people that lie in the path of his bulldozers, including the good people of Orchard Prairie.

Kelley believes the “open house” is superior to the “town hall” style meeting. He argues that some people are shy and don’t want to ask questions in an open forum.

His open houses are noisy, chaotic events in which citizens are shuttled from easel to easel to be handled one-on-one by a crew of employees that have demonstrated their open contempt for any public comment that might slow their manifest destiny of pavement. With 20 conversations going on simultaneously, it’s impossible to know what all is being said, and almost impossible to get any of it on the record. It sure works for Kelley.

I have, however, gotten some of it on tape. I have at least one county employee offering different answers to the same question asked by different citizens. It’s like a game of Three Card Monte.

To one citizen it’s, “We’ll start construction when we get the money.” To another it’s, “We’ll start construction when the Environmental Assessment is complete.”

To one citizen it’s, “Nothing is designed, these are all preliminary concepts.” To another it’s, “We’ll be bidding some of this work this spring.”

And always they say, “There will be many more meetings, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to offer input.”

My neighbors and I have no confidence that the process of designing and building the Bigelow “Turnpike” is competent and above board.

Kelley says that he understands all the complicated laws involved with this project. He’s “crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s.” I want a second legal opinion.

Kelley has been quite free with his philosophy of social engineering and the virtue and inevitability of high capacity highways to everywhere. He lives to build roads. I distrust his motives.

Meanwhile, back at the Kremlin, or in Tiananmen Square under martial law. In my youth I thought it was great sport to push the photojournalist envelope in certifiably totalitarian states. I’ve been detained by Communist Chinese authorities for shooting without the permission of the regime. You expect that in the People’s Republic of China or the U.S.S.R. I was crazy to mess around with them.

I went down to the county courthouse to tape the briefing session because I heard that the current Spokane County Commission prefers to conduct most of its business out of sight, in a technically open meeting that is held in a closet with no public cameras installed. I heard that later in the day they go before the public for a very short session in which the work of the briefing is quickly made policy.

I don’t know about the afternoon session and I don’t plan to find out. I’ll think long and hard before I take my cameras back to the courthouse. I’m getting too old for this.