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A LEADER in the Virginia General Assembly thinks that open government is neat as long as it does not apply to him and his legislative buddies.
At least that's what House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith seems to be saying in a bill he introduced that would exempt legislators from all open-meeting laws in the state's Freedom of Information Act.
Griffith, R-Salem, sought the legislation after Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, a fellow Republican, issued an opinion that the legislature's partisan caucuses violate the Freedom of Information Act by meeting behind closed doors if legislative votes are discussed.
Griffith's bill would authorize the assembly's Joint Rules Committee to say which meetings can be open and closed. That essentially means that the majority party can close anything it wishes. It is an invitation to mischief.
Kilgore holds that any meeting of three or more legislators must be open to the public if the lawmakers discuss "expected votes on matters pending before the General Assembly." He notes that many informal gatherings "fall into a gray area."
Griffith says such legislation is needed because party members have to be able to meet in private and that the current law--based on Kilgore's opinion--does not work in the citizen-legislator atmosphere in Richmond.
"I don't see a need for us to have constant question marks of what's in the gray area and constant question marks about whether an individual or an organization is going to file suit," Griffith says.
What he does not say publicly is that party members should be able to meet away from the public--and the Democrats--and plot legislative strategy.
Griffith's bill is producing strong opposition from open-government and media advocates.
"I believe this bill would wrongly exempt the General Assembly from its own Freedom of Information Act," said Forrest "Frosty" Landon, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government.
Griffith seems to foresee doom and gloom and the end of the legislature's ability to govern if lawmakers can't meet privately.
"I do not believe that we can continue as a part-time legislature if we are ever put in a place where three members cannot get together and discuss the policies of the commonwealth," Griffith argues. "I don't think it was ever intended for the Freedom of Information Act to apply to those situations."
Oh, my.
The thought of conducting public business in public seems to be more than Griffith can handle.
He insists that committee meetings and floor sessions would remain open to the public, and he does not want to close them. But his bill could do exactly that, because there would be no state law to stop it.
The boards of supervisors, city councils and school boards of the state do not have the privileges that Griffith feels he and his peers require so they can conduct public business in private.
The concept that the citizens---who are paying for government at all levels--would want to know how decisions are made seems foreign to Griffith.
But he is not alone in ignoring the openness concept.
For example, take the e-mail lawsuit involving several members of the Fredericksburg City Council. The case, in its most basic form, is this: Over the course of about a week, three members of the council--Mayor Bill Beck and Councilmen Matt Kelly and Scott Howson--exchanged e-mails in which they formed an agreement on an appointment to the regional library board. A judge ruled that was an illegal meeting.
Sometime this spring, the Virginia Supreme Court will make a ruling on the trio's appeal. The court may clarify issues of how technology and electronic communications fit into open-government laws.
Lost in that discussion, though, is this: A few council members were making decisions privately without involving the public or other council members. Regardless of the legalities, that is not government in the sunshine.
There is a more recent local example. Fredericksburg's School Board conducted what school Superintendent Dale Sander called a "preliminary vote" via telephone on one of the most important city decisions in decades: the size of two new schools.
Sander sent data and a recommendation to each School Board member and said if the member failed to call him by a specified time, he assumed the member had voted for the recommendation.
Two board members called with questions, but the city's residents--who will pay for these schools--have no idea what was said. The other board members apparently voted by their silence.
Two weeks later--with no public discussion--the board voted to approve the new schools.
State law calls for government to be open, to be public, and to benefit the residents who pay for it. This is what it says: "The affairs of government are not intended to be conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy since at all times the public is to be the beneficiary of any action taken at any level of government."
Furthermore, the FOIA "shall be liberally constructed to promote an increased awareness by all persons of governmental activities and afford every opportunity to citizens to witness the operations of government."
What the City Council did in its e-mail chat and the School Board did via telephone may not have been illegal.
But did they meet the test of the law's intentions?
I think not. Neither would the bill of Majority Leader Griffith.
Regardless of the legal issues of each case, the citizens are being cheated.
DICK HAMMERSTROM, a local-news editor at The Free Lance-Star, is chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee of the Virginia Press Association.