Open government like watching an autopsy

June 10th, 2009 at 09:05am Linda Grist Cunningham

Journalists who sit through thousands of hours of government meetings understand the deal: For every five or so hours of stultifying talk, you get one news nugget from which a decent story or headline can be spun. (Same happens in private business meetings, too, in case anyone wonders…)

Anyway, when you combine those hours-to-results ratios with transparency in government,  you get the MetroCentre ad hoc committee — and a series of headlines over the past several weeks along the lines of “report expected; oops, report not ready; wait until next week.”

(There’s one today, so if you want to know more about the news, click here.)

And then, as sure as God made flowers, there follow the  conspiracy theorists and the conflict specialists, all convinced something must be wrong, someone must be pulling the wool over our eyes, some arch-villain must be pulling the strings. (In the case of the MetroCentre ad hoc committee, the arch-villain is either Mayor Larry Morrisey or City Administrator Jim Ryan, although aldermen Frank Beech and Carl Wasco have taken some hits, too.)

Get a grip, people. If we want open government, and we do; if we want transparency, and we do, then watching it all happen is tantamount to being on the sidelines during an autopsy: sick-making, scary, messy and unfathomable.

What’s been happening with the MetroCentre ad hoc committee, is as Morrissey told Register Star city hall reporter Jeff Kolkey, “… standard operating procedure.”

You get a group of like-minded people together. They talk, study, argue, research, reach some decent conclusions. Someone takes all the notes and whips them into a report with charts, graphs, maps, executive summaries and narrative recommendations. The draft gets reviewed by the “owners of the project,” whomever they may be, revisions are made. The draft goes back to the full committee; more revisions are made — and the draft keeps on being revised until it becomes the official report to be presented for consideration.

So stop with the hyperventilating every time there’s a revision or a delay. If the final report reflects accurately and smartly the intent of the original committee, and if we get strong recommendations that can be implemented successful, we’re good.

The only warning I’d have is this: Keep the meetings, all of them, open. It may be like watching an autopsy — or conducting one with an audience — but it’s the right thing to do.

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