Valley residents want council committees open to the public

Some of the public bodies that do work on behalf of Spokane Valley residents meet privately, a fact some are beginning to speak out against. In these meetings — held, for example, by the Public Safety and Governance Manual Committees (see box below) — council members and city employees are usually at the very beginning phases of the policy-making process, where they brainstorm potential solutions. But those advocating for opening these meetings to average citizens find the idea of work being done on the public’s behalf but without its input suspicious and anathema to open government.

Some Valleyites (Valleyans?) are so concerned that they’ve made their ire a feature of recent city council meetings in which they’ve demanded these committee meetings be open to the public.

Kim Pollari, a Spokane Valley resident who works with open records for the Washington Department of Social and Health Services, told the Spokane Valley City Council as much at the council’s March 12 meeting .

“When you do not open things up like that, you lose credibility as council members,” Pollari said during the meeting. “It looks like you’re hiding decisions or discussions about topics that the public are interested in, and I have yet to hear a good reason why these meetings are closed.”

City council members who sit on some of those committees told RANGE they’re not trying to hide anything: they keep the public out of the meetings because, though making sausage is always messy, it’s worse in a crowded kitchen.

Mayor Pam Haley and Council Members Ben Wick and Tim Hattenburg told RANGE that these committees exclude the public because when they meet, they’re merely brainstorming solutions, which can be a messy process and never results in decisions, except to make proposals to the city council.

Hattenburg said if the public was in the room when the committee is determining which ideas stick to the wall, a citizen might misinterpret the conversations as something that is definitely happening. That citizen then might take that misunderstanding to social media, proliferating it throughout the community and causing confusion.

“Some of it can involve contract negotiations, or at least that topic might come up,” Hattenburg said. “None of it is set in stone, so to speak. And I’m not trying to be evasive, but what we don’t want to do is have the public take the perception, just run to the press … or put it on Facebook that this is what’s going on, and it really isn’t. It’s a work in progress.”

As the Spokesman recently reported , barring the public from these meetings is legal because they don’t technically fit the definition of a “meeting,” under state law.

The Public Safety Committee, for example, which has five or six members, makes sure only three of those are elected; the other two or three are city staffers. The reason there are only three members of the seven-member city council is so the committee meetings don’t convene a “quorum” — a voting majority of a public body — which in Spokane Valley’s case is the four-person threshold that allows the council to create laws.

State law says a quorum is what defines a public meeting under the Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA), one of two sunshine laws intended to let the public know what its government is doing. (The other law, the Public Records Act , says most documents generated by the government must be released to the public.) So if there is less than a quorum of members, no “meeting,” as defined in the OPMA, has occurred.

But public policy — how to address public safety issues, how much public employees are paid and the rules governing how council members conduct themselves when doing the people’s work — does take shape during these meetings.

There are at least four committees of the Spokane Valley City Council that exclude the public from their meetings. All are ad hoc , meaning the meet when needed rather than on a regular schedule. They’re listed here:
– The Public Safety Committee , which makes suggestions to the city council on how to improve the public safety in Spokane Valley
– The Governance Manual Committee , which proposes revisions to the rules that govern city council members’ conduct when they are doing work on behalf of the public. Those rules are contained in a document titled “The Governance Manual”
– The Finance Committee , which makes recommendations for changes to city contracts, travel by city employees, and other areas of financial management for the city
– The Agenda Committee , which sets the agendas for city council meetings

Here’s what the public can’t see: times and locations of the meetings and details of what actually happens in them. The city council members who sit on the committees bring much of the substance of their meetings before the full city council, but the public has no direct window into the discussion held in the committees, nor minutes to review after the fact.

Pollari quoted from state open meeting laws during the public comment section at the beginning of the March 12 city council meeting : “‘The legislature finds and declares that all public commissions, boards, councils, committees, subcommittees, departments, divisions, offices, and all other public agencies of this state and subdivisions thereof exist to aid in the conduct of the people’s business.’”

Such rules, broadly referred to as “ open government laws ,” were largely established across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s and culminated in the federal government in the Sunshine Act of 1976 (GSA). Its passage came during a period of soul searching for the American government after the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration pulled back the veil on systemic government corruption, including how it had continuously lied to Americans about being entrenched in the Vietnam War it was losing. The GSA applied to federal agencies but not state and local ones.

Each state has its own sunshine laws, but they lack enforcement mechanisms. According to an investigation by the Associated Press, most states, including Washington, rely on the courts to enforce sunshine laws. That means average citizens sometimes have to marshall expensive legal resources if they want to get information about the public work being done on their behalf. If they can’t access those legal resources — which can take many years to do the trick of illuminating hidden information — the secrets might simply remain secret.

Haley told RANGE the city of Spokane has similar committees that meet without notifying the public — and it’s true. (Though the Spokane City Council’s public safety committee meetings are public.)

RANGE reached out to city of Spokane spokesperson Erin Hut, who said there are three categories of meetings held by the city, two of which are open to the public. The third category, council workgroups “do not conduct public meetings or public hearings,” Hut wrote to RANGE in an email.

“Recently, council members have started giving brief updates on their board and workgroup assignments at standing committee meetings. This allows for workgroups to report out to the committee of the whole at a public meeting.”

The workgroups that provided updates at the most recent committee meeting included an ARPA workgroup, a Council Office Operations Workgroup, a Language Access Workgroup and an Inspector General Workgroup.

These workgroups seem to be most analogous to the Spokane Valley committee meetings, and there’s a case to be made that the only real difference between the bodies of Spokane Valley that meet privately and city of Spokane’s is the name: in the Valley, they’re committees; in Spokane, workgroups.

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