Make government accessible

What started as a bill to make Utah's Open and Public Meetings Act a bit more friendly to the public has taken a turn for the worse. As of Friday afternoon, HB166 would allow public officials to hold onto the minutes of a meeting as a "protected draft" until the body meets again.

Recordings of a meeting, if made, would be available "within a reasonable time."

Unfortunately, Utah has a shameful record when it comes to protecting the public's right to scrutinize its local governments. When lawmakers begin debating the topic, some of them operate under the automatic assumption that it is more important to protect the reputations of elected leaders than to let people know what really is happening.

A survey conducted last year by The Associated Press bore this out. The survey looked at open-government laws in all 50 states. Only two, Utah and Massachusetts, had absolutely no penalties in their laws for violators. Close a meeting illegally or withhold public records in Utah and the worst that can happen is you would face some bad publicity. Compare that to Florida, where a county commissioner in 2004 served 49 days in jail for violating the open meetings law. As a University of Florida professor who headed the survey told the AP, "A couple of prosecutions every once in a while wakes people up ..."

This isn't just an issue that concerns cranky journalists who want to read minutes before their deadlines. Local governments deal with a number of controversial issues that directly affect the public. In recent years, school districts have realigned boundaries and cities have changed zoning designations in ways that cost landowners money. The public deserves to know, as soon as possible, not only what the decisions were, but why they were made. People need to know who said what.

Elected officials may argue that public bodies often make changes to the official minutes before they are officially approved. But in this digital age, where anyone attending a meeting could record it legally and put the recording on the Internet, those concerns sound slow-footed, at best.

The changes to HB166 are almost as bad as SB71, which would allow officials to meet in secret to divvy up Jordan School District's property in the event the district's east side is allowed to split into a separate district.

Openness and quick access keeps public officials honest. It also keeps the honest ones above suspicion. We'd like to begin seeing bills that reflect that philosophy.