It’s how our local system works: an everyday resident, having met the criteria for a particular public office, files the appropriate paperwork with a designated clerk or school district official. They next run against others who have undergone the same process, and, come election day, voila! they find they have a seat.

It’s a good process. It allows members of the constituency to come forward and represent their fellow constituents to the best of their ability. The assemblage of several of these civic-minded individuals makes it possible for an electorate to engage, within the confines of state and federal laws, in self-governance.

It is democracy at work.

Sometimes these folks are, in their professional lives, lawyers, and may have an understanding of the laws that govern public open meetings and open records requests, but that’s a small percentage of the folks who come forward, and when it comes to a governing body, it’s best for every member to have at least a rudimentary understanding of these specific laws.

Federally, we have “Sunshine Laws,” defined by Cornell Law School as “regulations requiring public disclosure of government agency meetings and records. Sunshine Laws require specific businesses and government agencies to maintain transparency and disclose their activities to the public. The primary objective of these laws is to prevent fraud, corruption, inequality, and to maintain high ethical standards within such businesses and agencies.  

“Federal Sunshine Laws were created by the Government in Sunshine Act (also known as the Sunshine Act), passed in 1976, the purpose of which was to promote accountability among agencies in the federal government.”

The full discussion from Cornell Law School is here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sunshine_laws.

State statutes, regarding open meeting and open records laws, and Sunshine Laws are a lot to take in, understand, and follow. It should come as no surprise that most locally elected officials, having entered public life as legal laypeople, have a very limited understanding of any of these laws.

Recently, in Whitewater, the Whitewater Unified School District Board of Education asked its attorney to provide its elected officials with an open meetings and open records laws workshop.

It was, itself, an open meeting, abiding by open meeting laws, and WhitewaterWise was happy to attend.

It was thorough and informative, and, in our opinion, a very good and necessary service which was provided to all of the board’s members, not just the new ones, and by extension, the public at large. 

We liked it so much, we wrote a three-part story about the workshop so that the full electorate could have the same benefit of knowledge of the law.

The district’s board of education offered foresight in scheduling its workshop, knowing, its president said, that it had new members who were elected in April.

It’s an activity, we’d like to suggest, that also would be beneficial on the city government side. Tuesday’s city council meeting, with its protracted discussion about a proposed update to a city manager evaluation policy, serves as an example where an open meetings refresher workshop might have proved valuable. 

Every year, new elected officials will join our city’s school board and council. They will roll up their sleeves and seek to do good work. Most, with the exception of a few lawyers who run for office, will always be laypeople as they work within the confines of applicable state statutes and federal laws, and, to be sure, lawyers have specific fields of expertise, so not every lawyer who achieves office will be knowledgeable about this particular set of laws. 

One hopes, for the sake of the full constituency, our two boards — the school board and the city council — will develop and continue a policy to provide annual open meeting and open record laws workshops to their memberships.

Everyday people who are elected to roles within local government come together periodically, do their best, and go home to their everyday lives.

An annual workshop is not a rebuke of their efforts. It is a tool to help them more easily achieve the goals for which they’ve been elected — those of representative, transparent, meaningful and lawful governance.

Our three-part story, outlining the district’s workshop, can be revisited here: http://whitewaterwise.com/wusd-board-of-education-members-attend-open-meeting-public-records-laws-workshop/, here: http://whitewaterwise.com/wusd-board-of-education-members-attend-workshop-review-open-records-law/, and here: http://whitewaterwise.com/wusd-board-of-education-members-attend-attorney-facilitated-workshop-review-school-board-operations-ask-questions/.