CITY VENDETTISTS and state goo-goos shared a bad day Friday when the Virginia Supreme Court effectively cleared three Fredericksburg council members of violating an open-government statute by discussing municipal matters via e-mail. The case occasioned the opening of checkbooks–the city’s legal costs alone are about $200,000–and of law books. But the high-court justices found all the illumination they needed by cracking a pocket Webster’s.
Under state law, “meetings” of elected officials can occur electronically as well as in the flesh, and can be illegal if more than two such officials are talking (or typing) without prior public notification. However, the City Council members–Mayor Bill Beck, Scott Howson, and Matt Kelly–did not “assemble” when they exchanged e-mails in 2002, noted Justice Donald Lemons, because the time between the sending of specific e-mail messages and responses to them was hours or days. Justice Lemons wrote: “The term ‘assemble’ means ‘to bring together’ and comes from the Latin ‘simul,’ meaning ‘together at the same time.’ The term inherently entails the quality of simultaneity.”
The ruling reaffirms common sense. As Freedom of Information Act expert Becky Dale told us (appropriately, in an e-mail), “The councilmen could have held a series of phone conversations with each other and none would have been public record, but since they used e-mail, the discussions were public record [and] accessible to citizens.” Too bad Fredericksburg Circuit Judge John Scott Jr. missed this point of logic in tagging Messrs. Beck, Howson, and Kelly with an FOIA violation–though the judge still swung a hot bat (0.944), dismissing 17 of the 18 “secret meeting” counts against them, and fining the three plaintiffs $8,000 for fashioning two of the charges from street gossip.
With any luck, Friday’s ruling will close the book on the nasty factional rancor that has marked recent city politics, and that sometimes has drained energies better harnessed toward community progress. In a larger sense, the decision frees council members, county supervisors, and school board members all across the state from unreasonable constraints on speech.
If the law were as tightly cinched as some open-government enthusiasts wished, public officials would be hampered in executing their political mandates. No e-mail “multilogues”? No factional strategizing? (In the city case, ironically, such an interpretation would have permitted the two-member bloc to burn up its modems with partisan scheming while thwarting the five-member bloc’s countermeasures.) No shop talk by supervisors on a friendly river trip paddling a three-man canoe? Such excess, undertaken in the name of democracy, enfeebles democracy, which depends on open ideas even more than on open meetings.
Of course, visibility in many public matters is needed and good. But in America, the seminal political “reform” takes place every election cycle, where the sum of an official’s actions are definitively judged. It’s just such a judgment that inspired Our Town’s sore losers to file the spiteful suit whose final claw has now stopped twitching.
Copyright 2001 The Free Lance-Star Publishing Company.