Reproduced with permission of The Journal News.
Editorial: Keep meetings open
(Original publication: March 14, 2004)
It's not benevolence when government boards "allow'' the public into their meetings. It's the law.
On two separate occasions recently, town officials from Carmel and Greenburgh demonstrated that they, intentionally or not, did not adhere to the state Open Meetings Law when they held sessions that shut out the public. The problem arises frequently throughout the region.
New York's Open Meetings Law took effect in 1977, giving the public the right to attend meetings of public bodies, listen to debates and watch the decision-making process in action. The latter is especially important because, as much as some individual board members may dislike airing differences, taking a stand, backing down and compromising, doing what it takes to govern is important public work.
Meetings of a board — meaning a gathering of a majority of its members — must be open to the public, which, according to the law, should be given advance notification.
When a legislative body like a town board is of one political party, it can meet as a political "caucus,'' but only under the strictest of guidelines. A closed-door meeting called last Sunday by Carmel Supervisor Robert Pozzi clearly violated the state's Open Meeting Law, according to Robert Freeman, executive director of the state Committee on Open Government.
Pozzi had said the meeting was called to air out differences between board members aligned with warring factions of the Republican Party. He and two board members who are aligned with him showed; two other Republican Town Board members did not.
The meeting was wrong, and Pozzi is wrong to say he will hold more of them.
Meetings also can be held in closed, executive sessions, according to Freeman, under eight specific circumstances, among them: if the discussion could harm a life, or if it covers a criminal investigation or a governmental body's position in litigation or negotiation.
The latter circumstance came under dispute in Greenburgh recently. Councilman Steve Bass criticized his board and Supervisor Paul Feiner for discussing whether to sell Greenburgh's Town Hall in a closed-door work session rather than conducting the debate in the open.
Bass said that while portions of the discussion did concern negotiation strategy, which is appropriate for a private session, the conversation soon turned to the question of whether it would be better to sell the site or keep it.
That issue, Bass said, should be discussed in public. We agree. Feiner's suggestion that Bass was simply trying to "slow down the whole process" circumvents the spirit, if not the letter, of the Open Meetings Law.
"Executive session'' is frequently misunderstood and misused. For example, making a motion to enter into executive session to discuss "personnel,'' Freeman told the Rockland Community College Board of Trustees earlier this month, is not permissible.
The reason given in a motion must be more specific, he said, such as "to discuss the employment history of a particular person," staff writer Kari Neering reported.
The bottom line: There often are good reasons why public board meetings must be closed. But they must be sound reasons, not grounded in political, or even practical, expediency.