Letter to editor
Longmont-Times-Call, 9/15/09

CONDUCT BUSINESS IN PUBLIC

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have much confidence in public officials who duck behind closed doors whenever a sensitive issue arises. First a disclosure: As a longtime newspaper publisher now retired, I have served on both sides of this issue. I’m anti-secrecy; only rarely should it be necessary. While serving years ago as mayor in a different Colorado town, I forbade executive sessions. Despite land deals, personnel issues, lawsuits and attorney-client briefings, we functioned just fine. (SENTENCE REDACTED by Times-Call opinion pages editor: The same openness seems to be working in Boulder where secrecy is banned by the city charter.)
Operating apparently on the assumption that what we constituents don’t know won’t hurt us, the Longmont council’s use of “executive sessions” has become so prevalent that the Times-Call (smoke ‘em out, I say) finally exercised its watchdog role by seeking a court review of the latest episode. A brief history shows that this move is warranted: During 2001, Longmont City Council met secretly four times; in 2006, six; in 2007, seven. But in 2008, the first year of the new majority, the number spiked to 16 and, up until June of this year, there were 11 executive sessions.
This appetite for secrecy also tells me that those in power who act this way are capable of doing everything else they can to control the flow of information, like (I hear) attempting to pull all of the city’s legal notices out of the community newspaper to punish it for what it does or does not write about them. Do you suppose the scheme is to kill the private messenger and then filter city-spawned information through a journal published by city staff? Is that partly what the council’s recently launched newspaper called “Longmont Life” is about?
Secrecy should be a lively item in the upcoming election.
P.