Since taking office after voters recalled Jim West, Spokane Mayor Dennis Hession has made transparency a watchword of his administration.

Words aren’t enough, though, and Hession hasn’t matched his rhetoric with action. Tuesday night’s City Council meeting put the problem in focus.

At Hession’s direction, the city has spent $260,000 on a much heralded efficiency study. That’s a chunk of cash, but it would be a legitimate investment if it puts the city on a more solid organizational and financial footing. Once the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Matrix Consulting Group delivered the first draft of its nearly 500-page report – a draft said to be flawed by numerous “factual and presentation errors” – the mayor tried to keep it secret.

He contended that because of the alleged inaccuracies, the report was just a preliminary document and thus not subject to public disclosure requirements contained in the law. It would be wrong, he said Tuesday, to give the public inaccurate information.

He did share it with his department heads, of course, just not the public. He wanted to talk to city employees about it, naturally, but not to the public. He let City Council members see it, obviously, but only on the condition they keep it from the public.

The people who paid for it should see it too. They’re smart enough to understand that if it contains errors, they need to be corrected. It may not be the final word, but they deserve the chance to make their own comparison between the original and later drafts.

In spite of Hession’s objections, the report got out. After The Spokesman-Review obtained a copy and posted it on the Internet ( www.spokesmanreview.com), the mayor called a hasty press briefing about it Wednesday afternoon. Asked at the briefing for examples of the report’s errors, he couldn’t name one.

Wednesday’s press session was reminiscent of one he held last March when he wanted to talk about developments in a sex scandal involving a Spokane firefighter. That one was called after he learned the newspaper was about to publish a story identifying the previously unnamed employee.

These are not the actions of a mayor who believes in transparency. Such a mayor would look for ways to share information with the public; Hession looks for excuses to withhold it. That approach might make a citizen wonder what he has to hide.

So might his decision to hire the Gallatin Group, a high-octane public relations firm with a reputation for damage control, to handle the efficiency report’s eventual release – a job that could have been done by the numerous public information personnel already on the mayor’s payroll. The Gallatin Group, however, has an expertise in handling politically delicate issues, and one of the partners is a supporter and campaign adviser to Hession.

If this is the mayor’s idea of transparency, he needs new windshield wipers.