July 1st, 2008
Phone rings not so long after my blog post on the mayor-and-chair not telling the public that they wanted to re-do how the school board is elected. (See previous post on doing the public’s biz in public; don’t want to rehash the whole thing …)
Anyway, that call brings an interesting conundrum: What if it was the Rockforward! folks who wanted it kept secret and not the mayor-and-chair? In other words, what if I were off base in chastising the mayor-and-chair? It was just a conversation and we’ll do some more reporting to see if we can nail down the whodunit, but the question has, I think, an easy anwer: The mayor-and-chair, if they were told by Rockforward! to keep it quiet, ought to have said “Not a gonna happen. We are elected officials. We report to the voters and taxpayers. We believe in transparency. So either we hold hands and all three of us do this publicly, or we, the mayor-and-chair are gonna go do it by ourselves.”
It is, as I wrote in the previous post, well past time to work as hard at figuring out how to do the public’s business in public as we do in keeping in private. My guess is that if the mayor-and-chair refused to go along with the private sector “quiet types,” it wouldn’t take more than a couple times to open the doors and let some sunshine in.
July 1st, 2008
First some conflict of interest disclaimers: (1) my boss is plugged into the Rockfordward! Leadership Council, the RAEDC and the mayor’s education task force. He shares none of his insider information with me or News Tower journalists, nor with the editorial board. He does not know I am writing this and he may disagree; (2) I don’t speak for the editorial board. The board’s majority will weigh in later; (3) I am not opposed to an appointed school board, and have voted “yes” on it several times when it came before the editorial board. There are pros and cons worthy of exploration and under some circumstances, I might be happy with an appointed board; and (4) nothing makes me unhappier as a journalist than elected officials who think doing the public’s business in private is OK.
So, with those on the table: What in the name of heaven were Rockford Mayor Larry Morrissey and Winnebago County Board Chairman Scott Christensen thinking when they SECRETLY proposed studying taking over the Rockford District 205 board and appointing its members?
OK, it wasn’t so secret since that proposal was submitted in writing with a date of June 13 to a whole bunch of community leaders and business people who are part of Rockforward! and the RAEDC, and assorted other acronyms and organizations who meet privately to decide what the rest of us will know and how our community will grow. But it was not done publicly and it was done with the expectation that all those folks would keep it to themselves.
How naive of the mayor-and-chair to not realize someone would leak the darn thing to us. And they did. And we made calls and the mayor’s staff went into “please don’t run this until we can have a press conference and if you do you will jeopardize its chances and upset people” mode.
We ran it. I never even considered not doing so. The mayor-and-chair want an appointed school board like Chicago, then they ought to stand up there and say so in a public meeting. Do that FIRST, THEN you can send your proposal to Rockfordward! seeking $50,000 in research funding.
The mayor-and-chair like these quasi-public-private organizations because they can get public figures, elected officials, decision makers and players to the same table without having an open public meeting. It started with the old Council of 100 and organizations like the Convention and Visitors Bureau and is morphing nicely with RAEDC and its Rockforward! Leadership Council.
Now, the mayor-and-chair, instead of doing the public’s school business in public at the county board meetings and the city council meetings are doing them at a Rockforward! meeting. Not so good, guys.
Read the story.
