The lack of transparency at Puyallup City Council meetings has become a reoccurring theme.
In often subtle ways, this council and administration have thwarted the spirit of open government. Their actions are easily missed by casual observers of council: unusual timing for meetings about controversial topics like hiring the city manager, the struggle to televise council meetings and a party in city hall to honor past mayors the excluded the public and some council members.
The doors to this council haven’t been completely closed, but neither is the public being welcomed in with open arms.
When council first started discussing the retreat, Mayor Kathy Turner said it would be nice if the public and the media left council members alone for a few days to work out some of their personality problems.
Turner knows that every public meeting has to be open to the public. In the past, council held its annual retreats far outside of the city limits making it difficult for citizens to attend. With this year’s retreat being held inside the city, council was clearly worried voters might actually pay attention.
That Turner would even make such a suggestion is a slap in the face to one of the most critical tenants of democracy: open government.
City leaders are servants to the public not because they have more rights than any other citizen but because they have stepped forward to shoulder a great responsibility. Residents give these city leaders the authority to make decisions on their behalf, but not the authority to determine what they need to know.
A government should never be run in secret; doing so only weakens a city.
That’s why citizens should be outraged that council chose to meet 30 minutes earlier than the announced time for two days of the three-day retreat. At the end of the first and second days, council voted to convene at 10:30 a.m. the following day. The city’s public notice about the workshop, which was released Feb. 17, stated that the workshop would start at 11 a.m. on each day.
The state’s Open Public Meetings Act requires a 24-hour public notice for all meetings and changes to those meetings.
City Attorney Cheryl Carlson says the three-day workshop was only one meeting and the breaks in between, when council went home, had dinner with their families and slept, were adjournments. She said no 24-hour notice of schedule changes was required.
But Bill Will, a Washington Coalition for Open Government board member, says that’s a fairly liberal, self-serving interpretation. Tim Ford, the state’s open government ombudsman in the state attorney general’s office, disputes Carlson’s claim. He says there still should have been written notice provided.
Thirty minutes may not seem significant, but a lot of business can be covered in that amount of time. Without an audio recording of the workshop and had no one been in attendance when the announcement was made, the meeting could have essentially been private.
If council wanted an earlier start, they could have set the time originally for 10:30 a.m. If they were concerned about getting as much done in one day as possible, they could have stayed longer than the 4:30 p.m. ending time.
Instead, council chose to once again jeopardize the public’s trust that Puyallup city government is being conducted with full transparency.
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