The text message came over my cellphone at about 4 p.m. Monday.
It was from Jeff Clark, one of our reporters, who was out covering the Columbus-Lowndes Convention & Visitors Bureau’s month board meeting.
“They won’t let the media sit in the boardroom,” the message read.
I let that sink in for a few minutes, half-expecting another text saying that it was just some silly misunderstanding or, perhaps, a practical joke.
After exchanging a few more texts with Jeff – I wanted to know the details – I decided to drop in on the proceedings, one of those “This, I gotta see for myself” things.
I had heard plenty of stories about the CVB Board since my arrival at The Dispatch two months ago, none of them particularly flattering. This went beyond the petty bickering that has become the Board’s modus operandi, though. The idea that a Board entrusted with a million-plus dollars a year budget of taxpayer money would hold its meeting in a room that the media and public were not allowed to access is well beyond silly. It is absurd. In fact, it is illegal.
When I arrived, I saw a group of about 10 folks, including two reporters sitting in chairs in a room adjacent to the board room, which featured double doors that were opened. You could see the room and some of the board members, seated around a long oval table from that vantage point. You could hear some of the discussion, some of the time, but depending on your sight lines you could not always tell who was speaking.
After a brief discussion with Jeff, I found a seat. Aside from the two reporters, the other people in the outer room appeared to be senior citizens. As I took a seat, I leaned in to the man sitting in a chair in front of me. I noticed he was wearing a hearing aid.
“Can you hear what they are saying?” I asked.
“I could hear a lot better if you weren’t talking,” he said.
Oh.
A few minutes later, the man rose to leave. To my surprise, he patted me on the shoulder and confessed, “No. I couldn’t hear them at all.”
When a few other folks rose to leave the room I asked them the same question. Nobody could hear much of the discussions.
That’s really all I needed to know.
The CVB had been holding an illegal public meeting.
Under the Mississippi Open Meetings Act, “any state, county, or local executive or administrative board, commission, authority, council, department, agency, bureau, or any other policy-making entity, or a committee thereof, which is supported wholly or in part by public funds, or expends public funds, as well as any standing, interim or special committee of the State Legislature” must conduct its business openly before an “assemblage of members of a public body at which official acts may be taken upon a matter over which the public body has supervision, control jurisdiction, or advisory power.”
The law does not say that it’s OK to have a meeting in another room as long as the doors are open. Nor does it say that you can close the meeting to the public “if you are worried about the floors getting scratched up when people drag chairs into the room or people talking and laughing and otherwise being a nuisance,” which was the explanation I received from CVB Executive Director Nancy Carpenter when I approached her after the meeting.
My suspicion was that the idea of banishing the media – and the unsuspecting citizens who happened to be interested in what’s going on with their tax money – into an outer room was a tit-for-tat response to something the media had reported. You learn to live with that when you are in this business.
But holding a public meeting in a room that a reporter cannot enter goes far beyond that sort of childish retribution. It is a violation of public trust.
Carpenter assured me that this wasn’t a matter of pay-back. She just wanted to keep people from scratching up the floors and disrupting the meeting.
I bet if she had really thought it through she would have discovered there are solutions that do not include conducting public business in private.
When told that the folks in the outer room couldn’t hear the proceedings, Carpenter said she would explore the possibility of providing the Board members with microphones.
But the public has a right not only to know what is being said, but who is saying it. The configuration of the board, along with the public area being in another room, makes that highly unlikely.
It’s pretty simple. The Board needs to arrange the room in such a way that the public has access to it or it needs to find another room. Those are really the only options.
During my time at the meeting, I heard many references from the Board members to “us” and “we” and the “CVB,” but I didn’t hear any mention of the word “taxpayer.” Of course, I was in another room.
Who knows what they were saying.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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