Keep it open: Lawmakers should avoid effort to escape accountability (Posted 12/28/2009 08:00 am)
The issue: Four Texas cities and more than a dozen individual officeholders have filed suit against the state, seeking to kill part of the Texas Open Meetings Act.



They say: The people have a right to know what their elected officials are deciding and how their tax money is being spent.
Certainly some Rio Grande Valley officials — maybe not a majority, but at least some — really want to do the right thing. Those who do should convince their peers to stay away from efforts to destroy Texas open government laws.

Four Texas cities and more than a dozen individual officeholders have filed suit against the state, seeking to kill part of the Texas Open Meetings Act. The lawsuit follows the dismissal of a similar suit filed by two former Alpine city councilmembers earlier this year. The two former officials had been charged with violating the Open Meetings Act when they discussed public affairs in private conversations and through e-mails.

The indictments were dropped, but officials filed suit, claiming that the law violates their First Amendment right of free speech. A federal appeals court ruled in September that because the plaintiffs had left office and the law no longer applied to them, they didn’t have the legal standing to challenge it.

According to their lawsuit, the Open Meetings Act violated their First Amendment right of free speech. Of course, it does no such thing. People are free to say whatever they want. Public officials, however, are expected to discuss public issues within access of the public, whose fate they are deciding. The officials must tell the public that those deliberations are going to take place, so that interested people can be there to defend their interests.

The reasoning is simple: the people have a right to know what their elected officials are deciding and how their tax money is being spent. Allowing such discussions would enable officials to make backroom deals, without public knowledge, and use their official meetings to simply vote on issues with no public discussion, since those discussions had already been conducted without the people’s knowledge, or input.

Plaintiffs pursuing this new challenge apparently are trying to be clever. They aren’t asking that the Open Meetings Act be overturned, they just want the sanctions — up to six months in and up to $500 in fines — be erased. Officials would still be violating the law, but they could do so with impunity.

We agree with Brownsville City Manager Charlie Cabler, a former police commander, with respect to those who are chafing at the penalties and working so hard to eliminating them:

“You shouldn’t worry about penalties if you are following the law,” Cabler told a reporter last week.

Valley officials have had enough trouble with the law over the years. Several former officials remain in prison on various charges. Hidalgo County’s district clerk and one county commissioner, as well as Brownsville’s mayor, currently are awaiting adjudication on matters ranging from conspiracy to aid illegal immigration, to tax fraud, to DUI, to felony theft. A local state representative also faces charges of tampering with government records and perjury.

And the are just some of the current officials accused of breaking the law. We see no need to mention any of the dozens of former officials who have seen the wrong side of a prison door.

With our history, and local boards’ reputation for collusion, favoritism and clandestine deals, our officials would be ill advised to support efforts to weaken any law, especially one of the few that actually supports accountability.

Our nation operates on a basic principle: government with the consent of the governed. People can’t give — or deny — that consent if they aren’t informed.



— The Brownsville Herald