So, what if the mayor-and-chair weren’t keeping secrets?
July 1st, 2008 at 06:29pm Linda Grist Cunningham
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.
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2 Comments Add your own
1. Veritas | July 1st, 2008 at 11:56 pm
I don’t disagree at all that important activities which affect the community should be done with as much public exposure and involvement as possible—though anyone with any experience knows this is sometimes impractical (or even unwise) in early planning stages while ideas are being articulated into something presentable for community reaction.
However, one thing that bugs me is the automatic presumption by some in the media that groups such as business leaders in the leadership council have some evil, money-or-power-grubbing conspiracy in mind that they want to cloak in secrecy until it can be sprung onto a naive public who quakes in the shadow of the cartel’s power.
Come on—most of these leaders are trying to accomplish the same goal as everyone else, including the Register Star: make this a nicer place to live and work for their families, neighbors and employees. Are they 100% successful or always experts in managing the process? Of course not, since it appears they really are human. Perhaps in addition to their personal motives as residents they have a complementary business incentive. The funds being invested in these community projects are, afterall, private money. What’s wrong with that in a market-based society?
Let’s turn the tables a bit and ask this question of the newspaper’s free-from-bias-and-personal-motive editorial leadership: “Will you open to the public every internal editorial position and story planning meeting so we can see if your decisions are being influenced by a political agenda or a desire to shape public opinion—or heavens—maybe even a goal of selling more newspapers or ads?” Wait—nix on that last point. I forgot that journalism is always separated from the dirty world of commerce.
I will look forward to seeing the editorial meeting schedule and location in Sunday’s paper.
2. unmanager | July 2nd, 2008 at 7:24 am
As a former supporter of the mayor, my great disgust with the situation is a clear recollection of a campaign event where then candidate Morrissey proclaimed, \\\’ it\\\’s time to get the deal making out of the backroom and into the front room\\\’….guess it sounds good attacking opponents….
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