Secrecy tide keeps rising

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a rising tide of secrecy from Washington to Madison to local governments in Wisconsin. Those waters continue to rise if only incrementally. But it’s those incremental efforts to keep the public in the dark that citizens need to be especially aware of. Otherwise, we’ll eventually find ourselves in neckdeep water not quite certain how we got there.

Last week, the Appleton Post-Crescent reported that the Hortonville Village Board created financial penalties for those who leak closed session information.

“The ordinance, adopted on Thursday, states that ‘all trustees and village officials have a duty to refrain from disseminating information circulated during a closed session ...’ Violations could lead to a fine of $100 to $500 for a first offense, and $500 to $1,000 for another violation,” according to reporter Madeleine Behr.

Leaks are getting a lot of attention in Madison and Washington, where they may set off intergovernmental civil war. I’ll grant you that not every leak benefits the public. And that some may be downright dangerous if they involve national security. But, too often, leaks are the only way the public learns what’s really going on behind government’s closed doors.

The stakes are a bit lower in places such as Hortonville — I doubt that officials there have been in touch with Vladimir Putin — but that means there’s even less reason to impose penalties on those who disclose information to the public.

Christa Westerberg, of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said this in an email two weeks ago: “I think this citation ordinance trend — and I have heard of a few of these now — is very concerning on both First Amendment and transparency grounds. There are some occasions when the contents of closed sessions should not be immediately discussed, but the voters can deal with any perceived breach of trust at the ballot box. This also invites problems when the closed session was improper to begin with.”

Its a good question: Should people be punished for reporting violations of the law? That’s what the Hortonville ordinance opens the door to. Here’s hoping Hortonville residents have a higher regard for open government than their representatives on the Village Board.

Meanwhile, in Madison last week, the state Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving the Appleton Area School District, which closed from public view the workings of a committee reviewing the district’s ninthgrade English reading list. The district argues (and two courts have agreed) that because of the way the committee was formed by district officials, it wasn’t really a public body subject to the open meetings law.

But that’s a wrong-headed argument. The presumption always should be that any body created by a government agency is subject to open government rules unless there’s a very good and very specific reason for it not to be. How the committee was formed should not matter.

As Rick Esenberg of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty argued to the court, the committee’s work was exactly the kind of activity the public must be able to observe.

The open meetings law is “designed to get at where the real work of government is happening,” Esenberg told the justices. “That sausage making, if you will, has to happen in public.”

Exactly right. Here’s hoping the justices agree.

And here’s hoping that alert citizens and reporters will keep watching local government to keep that tide down.