EDITORIAL: Opening meetings now can avoid trouble later

Jan. 30--The best way to sum it up? Actions have consequences.

You probably can think of your own real-life examples of that. We'll offer a more recent example, and along the way it underscores the importance of open meetings.

We'll start with the consequences. The Augusta-Richmond County Coliseum Authority had a harder time than usual shopping around for public officer and director liability insurance. The policy pays if authority members' actions result in the authority having to pay damages.

State Farm, the original insurer, wouldn't renew the old policy. Eight other insurance companies didn't respond to queries about another policy, either, until Blanchard and Calhoun sold one to the authority.

State Farm saw that a complaint had been lodged with the state attorney general's office against the authority. Depending on which side you ask, the authority may or may not have violated the state open meetings law.

At an authority meeting in 2017, several members wanted to talk about offers from Cardinal Management to build a new James Brown Area at the old Regency Mall. (Incidentally, that's not the bad choice we're talking about, but it's a doozy.)

So the authority closed the meeting to the public, citing the real-estate exception in the Georgia Open Meetings Act, and allowed four Augusta commissioners to sit in. That was fishy enough for Augusta Chronicle reporter Susan McCord to notice, and for local businessman and former Augusta Commission candidate David Dunagan to later file the complaint with the state.

Authority attorney Ed Enoch, who told the authority about the insurance problem at its Jan. 22 meeting, has defended the closure by citing a 1998 Georgia attorney general unofficial opinion dealing with similar circumstances involving the Georgia General Assembly.

But Augusta attorney David Hudson, who also represents the Georgia Press Association, rightly said the closure essentially gave "selective attendance rights" to the public on a matter of extreme public interest. And the authority members didn't have a special reason above any other member of the general public to be in that meeting.

The state attorney general's office declined to mediate the complaint and dismissed it.

Of course the whole matter was rendered moot anyway after the Augusta Commission rejected the Cardinal proposal, thank heaven. And even if you did go into mediation over this complaint, what would you gain? Nothing that would justify the time and cost, Hudson said.

Instead, the sides will just agree to disagree.

Open-meetings and open-records laws are proudly called "sunshine" laws because they're designed to dispel the darkness in which too many public officials work. It can't be said often enough -- we need to see what our officials are doing.

Really this is a continuation of the bedrock principles of good government from the times of our Founding Fathers. We like this quote from Thomas Jefferson. It even rhymes:

"If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be."

What should public officials do to avoid bad consequences? Such as financial risk, litigation and disservice to the public?

It's pretty simple: Just operate in the open -- and make it a high priority.

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