It ain’t over ’til …

Remote participation shutdown mishandled

It makes perfect sense that many, if not all, of the covid-related precautions put in place for public health reasons should one day come to an end.

After all, isn’t that what everyone longs for when they say they’re ready for this pan- demic to be in the rear-view mirror and for life to return to normal?

It’s only because of the existence of the pandemic that the No. 1 wish among Arkansans isn’t to see the current session of the Arkansas Legislature come to a merciful end. But we digress …

Gov. Asa Hutchinson on March 30 lifted the statewide mask mandate, the biggest trigger so far in Arkansas to encourage the state’s residents to start feeling as though the pandemic is winding down. Of course, it’s far more complicated than that. Even Hutchinson paired his removal of a mandate with comments urging people to continue voluntarily to wear masks when the recommended physical distancing from others in public wasn’t possible.

In other words, the official state policy was and is that everyone should wear masks as they did under the mandate, but the state won’t make you do it. Hutchinson made it clear businesses, school districts and other levels of government could continue to require masks, but it was their decision, not his.

On the same day, Hutchinson also extended eligibility for coronavirus vaccines to all residents 16 and older. If every eligible person went out the very next day and began a twodose vaccination — an impossibility given the vaccine supply — the quickest they could be considered fully vaccinated under federal guidance is May 5. The covid threat remains even if the state’s population has made great strides in slowing its spread.

That’s why it’s perplexing that Washington County Judge Joseph Wood last week dismantled pandemic-related measures that allowed the 15 elected justices of the peace and the public to participate in Quorum Court meetings remotely through video technology most public bodies adopted last year to keep public decision-making going while also preventing the spread of covid-19.

Wood made no public announcements. Those who had used the online meetings as a way to stay engaged in county government simply noticed the usual link to sign into the online meeting didn’t appear on the county calendar as it has for months.

County Attorney Brian Lester said because of persistent technical problems of the past, as well the fact all justices of the peace have had time to be vaccinated if they wished, “it was decided it would be easier to proceed as normal with our meetings.”

Most public bodies haven’t pulled the plug on using remote meeting technologies yet. Benton County Judge Barry Moehring, for example, said his county plans to use the combined approach of in-person meetings that allow remote participation until the state declaration of a public health emergency expires, now set for May 30. Moehring continues to ask people to wear masks in meetings where social distancing isn’t possible. Wood, with Lester citing the end of the state mandate, has ended expectations that people physically attending county meetings wear masks.

As we noted, the end of pandemic-related restrictions is a desirable goal, but a lot of public leaders recognize it’s too early to pretend covid-19 is no longer a factor in the conduct of public meetings. Even if one accepts that the elected officials — who got access to vaccines weeks before the general public younger than 65 — can safely return to face-to-face meetings, they continue to have barriers between each of their seats. No such barriers exist for members of the public who must now show up and sit among others, some of whom will choose not to wear masks, if they want to be involved in or monitor discussions of public business at the Quorum Court. Seats were, thankfully, set up at a distance, the limits of which are one more argument for continued remote participation.

Even another month of precautions would have dovetailed better with the public’s access to vaccines and certainly a public announcement of such plans would have been well advised.

To make matters worse Thursday evening, the YouTube broadcast of the meeting — an important mechanism for public transparency that existed before anyone ever heard of covid-19 — failed to function as it has in the past, too. Perhaps that, too, was the result of a change made too quickly.

It’s not the first time a public official has taken a minimalist approach to public transparency and accountability and it won’t be the last. Of course, the public the Quorum Court and Wood are there to serve deserves elected officials who go the extra mile in preserving the public’s right to access public meetings. This week in Washington County, nobody got that.