Lower Merion Citizens for Responsible Budgeting (CRB)
Romasco: Manos wrong about right to closed meetings in LM
August 12 , 2009
To the Editor - MainLine Times
Last week Commissioner Manos decried the term “secret” and preferred the word “private” when referring to closed meetings of the Lower Merion Board of Commissioners. He wrote “Commissioners, being people, need a measure of privacy.”
It would have been appropriate to say “Commissioners, as private citizens, need a measure of privacy.”
However, in their capacity as elected officials they are no longer private citizens; they are public servants and as such it is totally inappropriate to seek “privacy” for their actions except as enumerated in the narrow exceptions of the Sunshine Act.
Mr. Manos states, “The open-meeting topic does not involve all-or-nothing choices; even the Sunshine Act tells you so.” On the contrary, the Sunshine Act and case law supporting it are quite clear: with a few specific enumerated exceptions, any meeting of the Board of Commissioners or a committee thereof, ad hoc or otherwise, at which a quorum is present and discussion takes place must be open to the public, must be posted, must have minutes kept and must have opportunity for public comment. There is no graduated spectrum of transparency compliance. Mr. Manos’s argument that transparency can be relative and that citizens should be satisfied that the township is more transparent than in the past (though less than required by the Sunshine Act) is no more than wishful thinking on his part.
Mr. Manos continues with a series of “facts.” The only actual facts in his statements are the numbers of committees of the whole [board], committees appointed by the board and ad-hoc committees which exist. He then hypothesizes on how many times they each might meet a year (whether they actually do or not) and comes to the conclusion that there might be 500 opportunities for public participation.
The problem with this “logic” is multifold. First, until recently, and still with only a few ad-hoc chairmen requiring adherence to the Sunshine Act, the ad-hoc committee meetings are not posted and thus not open to the general public nor recorded with minutes. Even in those cases where the meeting is open, public comment is not always allowed. More important, even if we accept Commissioner Manos’s estimate of 500 meetings, we know from the fact that there were 50 items on the pre-board agenda three weeks ago that the business of all these committees is also occurring outside those 500 meetings. His implication is that 500 public forums are surely enough to satisfy the need for transparency. The law, however, requires that every meeting must comply with the Sunshine Act, whether it is the 499th meeting, the 650th or the 1,500th.
Commissioner Manos then falls back on the oft-repeated excuse of the unwieldiness of transparency: how difficult it would be to separate true executive-session material from day-to-day business. I am a former elected chief executive officer from Massachusetts where the Open Meeting Act is even tougher. Let me assure the public: it’s not that hard! Are you purchasing land? Involved in an identifiable litigation? Disciplining an employee? Discussing labor-contract negotiations? If it’s not one of these, it’s subject to Sunshine.
Commissioner Manos next resorts to fantastic hyperbole to paint a picture of citizens ambushing public officials in the hallways and rifling through file cabinets. This is ridiculous. When citizens are confident that transparent government presents the full picture, they are less likely to make FOIA requests. Similarly the time which staff currently spends answering individual citizens on a one-on-one basis could be reduced by open meeting discourse.
Finally Commissioner Manos throws out a red herring, suggesting that proponents of open meetings are trying to apply the Sunshine Act to staff-only meetings, chance meetings of the commissioners and meetings with less than a quorum. This is patently false. However, to suggest that scheduled meetings with prepared agendas, attended by a quorum of the board or committee, in any way fall into his imagined scenario is ludicrous. These “pre-board” and committee meetings are totally governed by the Sunshine Act.
Perhaps the only statement that I can agree with Commissioner Manos on is this: “There would be no issue raised by a commissioner in an informational meeting that could not also be raised at the corresponding open meeting unless confidentiality rules applied.” Given this, why are the Lower Merion commissioners constructing such tortured arguments to support shutting out the citizens?
Commissioner Manos would have us believe that it’s a matter of reasonableness to allow the board to continue to have closed, secret meetings. He is wrong. It is a matter of the law that they comply with the Sunshine Act.
Audrey W. Romasco, Bryn Mawr