The public can’t know what it can’t see. Welcome to Pittsburgh City Council.
As the Tribune-Review reports it:
“For years, Pittsburgh City Council members have gathered behind closed doors to talk in private about public policy.
“No one keeps a log of who attends. No minutes are maintained of what is said. And council members, desperate to ensure they don’t have too many people present, sometimes duck out of sessions to avoid a quorum of the nine-member elected body.”
Sounds like purposeful evasion of openness and transparency, does it not?
Continues the Trib story:
“The only record of what is discussed can be found in the briefest descriptions in council’s online records: city debt, an anti-litter program, deer management and other mundane topics.
“Council members treat these meetings as off-limits to everyone except aides and those whom they invite to join them in a nondescript conference room on the fifth floor of the City-County Building in downtown Pittsburgh.
“Experts say all the secrecy might violate the spirit of Pennsylvania’s open meetings law.”
How about a more fundamental violation – of the public trust?
Heck, “Even City Council Solicitor Dan Friedson acknowledged that at least some of these meetings ought to be open to the public,” the Trib noted:
“Friedson said he ‘can’t think of a single reason’ why a March 27 meeting on deer management, for example, should have been held away from the public eye. Similarly, he raised concerns about the lack of openness for a recent off-limits gathering concerning the city budget, a hot-button issue lately as the city’s controller has warned of looming fiscal turmoil for Pittsburgh.”
Yet, and inexplicably, the Trib also reports that Friedson himself has attended some of City Council’s private meetings but “has not advised Council one way or the other about holding such closed-doors sessions.”
Really? What’s he to do, hold his hands to his ears and chant “Na-na-na-na-na-na-na”?
But he also told the Trib that the council should call for privacy only when they go into executive session to seek legal advice or discuss personnel matters.
Will wonders ever cease?
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society,” reminded John F. Kennedy. “And we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings.”
That Pittsburgh City Council requires a remedial lesson in the proffering and prosecution of public policy is a sad testament to what one-party rule has produced. For secrecy in government is the worst public policy of all.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
