The Steamboat Springs School Board learned an expensive lesson this week when it agreed to cough up $50,000 in legal fees incurred in a fight over a secret meeting.
The dispute involved the board’s public notice for an executive session — a closed-door meeting — in 2007 to discuss a controversial survey in which staff voiced opinions about district administrators.
The Steamboat Pilot & Today newspaper deserves recognition for taking the matter to court and following through until it prevailed. At a time when newspapers are facing difficult finances, the Pilot acted in true watchdog tradition by hiring lawyers to protect the public interest.
In March, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled the school board violated the state’s Open Meetings Law by inappropriately describing the topic of the closed-door meeting.
The law requires public bodies to spell out, in as much detail as possible, what they are planning to discuss behind closed doors.
In this case, the board merely said it was going into executive session to talk about a personnel matter that involved “access to information.”
The court found the district was deficient when it failed to say the executive session was about releasing survey results and that the personnel matter at hand was the superintendent’s performance.
As the court said in its decision, “It would not have compromised the purpose of the executive session to go into that amount of detail.”
Far too frequently, governments improperly invoke privacy protections and “personnel matters” when they are really just trying to avoid talking about something controversial.
The Court of Appeals ordered the district to pay the newspaper’s attorney fees, and on Monday, the school board accepted an offer from the Pilot to settle fees at $50,000.
Troubling, however, was the reaction of one school board member, who voted against the settlement.
Board member John DeVincentis was quoted in the Pilot as saying it was an “in-your-face move” by the Pilot “to take $50,000 away from our students.”
It hard to fathom the twisted path of reason DeVincentis had to take to arrive at blaming the Pilot for the board’s own arrogance. The Pilot reported that twice it expressed concerns to the school board that the meeting it was going to hold was illegal, but to no avail.
Board members have no one to blame but themselves for this situation, and to do otherwise is disingenuous at best.
Creating public policy is public business and ought to be subject to as much sunshine as possible. The Pilot deserves credit for its tenacity in upholding that basic truth. Bravo.
