Bills have been introduced in this year’s session of the Mississippi Legislature that would clarify two important issues.
House Bill 633 (a copy of it is Senate Bill 2204) would provide an opportunity for a court hearing to have a public body’s action invalidated if the vote occurred during a meeting that violated the state Open Meetings Act.
This is a proper consideration. If a board approved something behind closed doors that should have been done before the public, the best penalty — even better than fining board members personally — is to reverse the action.
Doing that would send a public signal that the officials were violating the law. Ignoring this bill could encourage more secrecy, because other public officials could decide to do the same thing, essentially asking for forgiveness later instead of permission in advance.
The House bill is flexible on the issue. It says a judge can void any action of a public body wrongly handled in secret “if the court determines that the public interest in voiding the action taken outweighs the public interest of sustaining the action itself.” The proposal also sets a sensible two-year limit on going to court to get a board’s decision reviewed.
The second matter involves whether the Open Meetings Law applies to the Legislature itself. The state Ethics Commission decided last year that the law did not specify this. Senate Bill 2667 would add a few words to the Mississippi Code to change that.
The Ethics Commission’s decision came in a case where a reporter for the Mississippi Free Press was not allowed to attend a meeting of the House Republican Caucus. The reporter contended that since a majority of House members would be there, it constituted a quorum. And since legislative business would be discussed, the meeting should have been open to the public.
House Speaker Philip Gunn contended the Open Meetings Act does not specifically apply to the Legislature, and a majority of the Ethics Commission basically agreed with that assessment. But it makes no sense to hold virtually every other public board in Mississippi to a high standard of openness, while having a lower standard for the public officials with the most power and influence in the state.
The Senate bill would solve this problem by specifically identifying the Legislature as a public body that is covered by the Open Meetings Act. The bill deserves strong consideration, but may run into resistance from some Republicans, who hold a majority of the seats in both the House and Senate, and thus would be affected.
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
