Winter Park’s 1-on-1 meetings undermine ‘Sunshine’ laws
A recent back-andforth between the First Amendment Foundation and Winter Park city officials has highlighted a troubling issue for supporters of Florida’s “Government in the Sunshine” laws: the questionable legality of one-on-one meetings between elected officials.
Winter Park Mayor Steve Leary, referring to his meeting with Commissioner Gregory Seidel on Nov. 29 and Seidel’s one-on-one with Commissioner Pete Weldon on Nov. 14, says the meetings complied with the “Sunshine” laws: They were publicly noticed, open to the public and tape-recorded for posting on the city’s website.
Such meetings, Leary told the Orlando Sentinel, are an “efficient” way for him to “understand where my counterpart is coming from.” And to FAF President Barbara Petersen, who called such meetings “bad public policy,” Leary said this:
“[These meetings] are perfectly legal and in no way impair our constituents’ opportunity to know what we are thinking and discussing.”
But a look at the details surrounding the meetings shows why Leary’s defense is, at best, problematic. Consider:
The Nov. 29 meeting began on 8:30 a.m. on a Thursday; the Nov. 14 meeting at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday. Anyone with a daytime job would have had to make special arrangements to attend — and almost no one did.
There was no posted agenda; the notice simply stated that “current city issues” would be discussed. And as of Monday, no minutes of either meeting had been prepared.
The audio recordings, while not required by law, had significant failures. The Nov. 14 recording features a 10-minute gap, among other problems. During the Nov. 29 meeting, audience members complained for more than 30 seconds that they couldn’t hear Leary and Seidel; neither could anyone listening to the tape.
But these specifics shouldn’t obscure a broader point: one-onone meetings undermine the reason the “Sunshine” laws were enacted in the first place.
In the very first court test of the “Sunshine” laws in 1969, Supreme Court Justice James C. Adkins Jr. declared that the public had an “inalienable right to be present and to be heard at
wherein decisions affecting the public are being made.” (Emphasis added.)
In other words, it’s not enough to let the public in to witness a commission’s final vote on an issue. “Government in the Sunshine” means that the public has the right to watch the deliberations — the back-and-forth debate among the elected officials — that determine the outcome of the actual vote.
And that, in turn, means that any advocacy — for or against — should be spontaneous, not worked out in advance in “efficient” one-on-one meetings.
Sure, it’s easier for any elected official to know beforehand where his fellow commissioners are coming from.
It’s even more “efficient” to shut citizens out of the process entirely. Which is exactly what a proliferation of one-on-one meetings, held at inconvenient times with cursory notice and agendas, threatens to do.
And that’s why Leary and his commissioners should stop them — now.