This blog is designed to give readers a glimpse of our editorial-page operation and how we make our decisions. We’ll let you know who we’re meeting with, what they’re telling us, what events and issues we’re looking at. We’ll also pass on information and observations that may not make our print editions. In addition to the editorial board members who post on this blog, the board includes Publisher David Zeeck, Executive Editor Karen Peterson and Managing Editor Dale Phelps.
Editorial board bloggers
Editorial page editor Patrick O’Callahan oversees the online and printed opinion sections of The News Tribune. He came to The News Tribune in 1987 and has worked at Washington newspapers since 1979. E-mail him at patrick.ocallahan@thenewstribune.com
Editorial writer Cheryl Tucker, in addition to writing commentary, manages the daily production of the editorial and op-ed pages and edits letters to the editor. She began her journalism career in 1974 at a Virginia newspaper and came to The News Tribune in 1978. E-mail her at cheryl.tucker@thenewstribune.com.
Editorial writer Kim Bradford manages the online opinion section of The News Tribune and writes commentary. She joined The News Tribune in 2005 after working 11 years at newspapers in Washington and Maryland. E-mail her at kim.bradford@thenewstribune.com.
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Editor emeritus David Seago retired from The News Tribune in 2008 after 41 years at The News Tribune. E-mail him at sds99@harbornet.com.
Richard Davis’ column on state politics frequently runs in the print edition of The News Tribune. He was president of the Washington Research Council, a statewide think tank, from 1986 through 2006. Currently, as a principal with The Simeon Partnership, Inc. he coordinates the activities of the Washington Alliance for a Competitive Economy, a business coalition founded by the Research Council, the Association of Washington Business and the Washington Roundtable.
Karen Irwin of University Place, a mother of four, has been a frequent contributor to The News Tribune's print editions. She has also written for Seattle's Child, Puget Sound Parent, the Tacoma Weekly, the Fayetteville Observer Times and the political blog Right Meets Left. She graduated from California Lutheran University with a degree in English literature and is currently working toward a history degree.
Michael Allen, professor of history at the University of Washington Tacoma, was born and raised in Ellensburg. He served with the U.S. Marines in Vietnam from 1969-70. He has written five books, including the prize-winning "Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus' Great Discovery to the War on Terror," "Rodeo Cowboys in the North American Imagination" and "Western Rivermen, 1763-1861: Ohio and Mississippi Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator Horse." Allen lives in Tacoma and Ellensburg and has three children.
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This editorial will appear in Tuesday's print edition.
City Council members who e-mailed each other about council business during council meetings were, at the very least, rude.
Rhenda Strub is not going to like this editorial.
She’s the Olympia city councilwoman who’s miffed that a guy named Steven Segall had the gall to question the City Council’s practice of conducting private meetings via e-mail from the council dais.
Segall, you see, lives in Thurston County, but not in Olympia – a fact that apparently disqualifies him from the right to question the council’s practices.
Strub told The Olympian newspaper, “He’s just meddling in something that, frankly, is none of his business.”
Consider this our application to join Segall in the Olympia Meddlers Club. We too live outside the Olympia city limits, and we too think the council’s deliberation-by-Internet stinks.
So does the attorney general’s open government expert, Tim Ford. He wrote to Olympia Mayor Doug Mah last month to criticize the council’s use of e-mail during council meetings.
“E-mail deliberations on public matters that are concurrently being discussed in a public meeting are wholly inconsistent with the requirements of the Open Public Meetings Act and should cease,” Ford said.
Segall brought the matter to the attorney general’s attention after requesting and receiving copies of the council members’ e-mails during six City Council meetings this fall.
Those e-mails show council members lining up votes and, in one case, calling a community activist sitting in the audience a “coward.” A Sept. 23 exchange shows council members debating – unbeknownst to the public – the release of a property from a moratorium.
The e-mails, if not a direct violation of state open meetings law, are at the very least, a rude way to treat people who attend council meetings expecting to hear members debate the items on their agenda. They also certainly violate the spirit of the law.
That the city released the e-mail records after the fact is an outright admission that the exchanges were a public deliberation that should have been happening in public.
The release is no substitute for letting citizens in on the conversation when it’s actually occurring. The promise of future disclosure means little when the public may learn too late that a back-and-forth on e-mail may have influenced an important policy decision.
We may be interlopers from outside Olympia, but the idea that a council could have what amounts to a secret meeting under the cover of an ostensibly legal and public one should be troubling to anyone concerned with ensuring that public business is done in public.
The Olympia council is certainly not alone in using technology to circumvent (elected officials say “expedite”) the public process. These practices have the potential to undermine the state’s open meetings law – and the 2009 Legislature ought to plug this loophole.
Busybodies and meddlers everywhere must be alert to official abuses of information technology.
Unfortunately, the very technology that often helps citizens monitor the inner doings of government can also be used to shut the public out.
COMMENTS:
To do less hints at potential "wrongdoing"and deliberate disregard for even token respect for "Open Government".
I don't mean to imply that the Tribune is hypocritical, but...
This is small potatoes compared to what happens in Tacoma right under the Tribune’s nose. Why does the Tribune always avoid reporting on those transgressions?
How about the end of 2004, when council members were deciding the 2005-2006 Biennial Budget, sharing their prototype budgets back and forth, not in public meetings, in clear violation of the Open Public Meetings Act.
How about in 2006 when deciding the 2007-2008 Biennial Budget? What was it Talbert said in 2007 about the process, "running around making deals… it certainly wasn’t out in the open, though. If we did it this way last year, out in front of everybody in the open, the conversations taking place at the table, maybe on TV, as opposed to how it has been done…"
Where was the Tribune when in 2007 Tacoma's Mayor has admitted to holding secret meetings. He recalled (as he stated), "sitting in the living room with some of my council colleagues and I was asked what I wanted in the budget, there were five or six of us, and what who else, this is before you were on the council, and who else wanted to be in the budget and that was how we made budget decisions and then we sprung it on the public, that was an obvious violation of the Open Public Meetings Act."
Go ahead, ask them Patrick. (And remind them that these were recorded statements. They are in the public record.)
They were deciding the status of millions of dollars of spending. It should all have been done publicly in properly notified meetings.
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