|
On Thursday night, as expected, the House State Government and Tribal
Affairs Committee took action on HB 3292, giving the bill a “Do
Pass” recommendation and sending it on to the full House. HB 3292 is
the bill, requested by the Attorney General and the State Auditor,
which would require all local governments (including school boards) to
record executive sessions for review by a court if someone takes legal
action alleging a violation of the executive session provisions of the
Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA). Earlier this week, it appeared the
bill would die for lack of action; however, the Attorney General, the
State Auditor and Rep. Lynn Kessler, the House Majority Leader and
prime sponsor of the bill, put on a full-court press and persuaded the
Committee Chair to bring the bill up for action — and secured one
additional positive vote needed to adopt the bill.
Before the Committee voted on HB 3292, Rep. Mike Armstrong (a former
school director) made attempts to amend the bill. One amendment would
have limited the provisions of the bill to local governments with more
than 100,000 constituents. Armstrong argued that the bill would prove
to be too costly and too difficult for the many small jurisdictions of
the state to comply with the new law. The amendment was
rejected. Other Armstrong amendments would have made the provisions of
the law applicable to the Legislature; would have provided definitions
of “executive session” and “quorum;” and would have only allowed
special sessions to be called when a quorum of the governing body was
achieved. The Committee Chair commented that he would like to work
with Armstrong on the amendment about definitions when the bill
reaches the House floor, but requested each of the amendments be
turned down in Committee. Armstrong replied, “We’ll be submitting a
lot of amendments to this bill on the floor.” Each amendment was
defeated by the Committee. Prior to the vote, several passionate
comments were made. Rep. Armstrong made strong comments regarding his
concerns about the bill. He remarked that some business of government
needs to be done in private and the Open Public Meetings Act provides
clear, succinct and tight exemptions to the provisions of the OPMA. He
flatly stated that if this bill is adopted, it will force many members
of local governing bodies to have one-on-one private conversations
about issues before the governing body, which would break the spirit
of the OPMA, but not the letter of the law. His strongest comments
were about his defeated amendment which would have applied provisions
of the Open Public Meetings Act to the Legislature: Armstrong said
that by defeating that amendment it signals to local governments that
the Legislature believes they are “above everyone else” and is
comfortable mandating these provisions for everyone but
themselves. (Currently, the courts and the Legislature are exempt from
OPMA.) Rep. Sherry Appleton, Vice Chair of the Committee, also was
very vocal in her opposition to the bill. She strongly stated her
belief that if the bill is enacted it will further dilute the current
attorney-client privilege exemptions of OPMA and will have a chilling
effect on discussions among governing boards. She also took a shot at
the news media — major proponents of the bill — saying that newspapers
love this bill because they want into local government executive
sessions to find out details about personnel matters. Rep. Mark
Miloscia was the only Committee member who spoke out in favor of the
bill. He echoed comments made by the Attorney General and the State
Auditor, saying the HB 3292 was about “accountability for elected
officials.” (Oops — just locally elected officials apparently.)
Ultimately, HB 3292 was adopted by the House State Government and
Tribal Affairs Committee by a vote of 5 to 3, with three Democrats and
two Republicans supporting, and two Democrats and one Republican
opposing. The bill faces an uphill battle in the full House; however,
the Attorney General, the State Auditor and the House Majority Leader
have already proven the kind of influence they can have — and, of
course, newspaper editorial boards have resumed their vocal support
for the bill, too.
Only a few policy committees held meetings today. Normally, the
cut-off day sees much activity as legislators attempt to adopt
priority bills before they technically die. This year, things are a
bit different. Most policy committee action ended yesterday — the day
before the cut-off deadline — but the House Appropriations Committee
met today. The Appropriations Committee traditionally holds a marathon
meeting on Saturday, sandwiched between the policy committee cut-off
and the fiscal committee cut-off (Feb. 12 this year); however, it held
its all-day meeting today (with another one scheduled on Monday), so
legislators will be able to participate in tomorrow’s neighborhood
caucus meetings, where many delegates will be chosen for the Democrat
and Republican conventions as they seek to nominate a presidential
candidate. (Note: the Democrats will allocate all 78 of their elected
national delegates through the caucus process, and Republicans will
use tomorrow’s caucus results to allot about half of their 37 elected
delegates. Republicans will use results of the Feb. 19 Presidential
Preference Primary to elect their remaining national delegates, while
the Democrats won’t use it to allocate any delegates. For them, the
Primary will be a nonbinding popularity contest.) We will provide
updates of action in the House and Senate fiscal committees in the
coming days.
We look forward to
seeing many of you on Sunday and/or Monday for the annual WSSDA/WASA
Legislative Conference. Due to the Conference schedule, we will not
produce a Legislative Update on Monday; however, we will resume our
regular Updates on Tuesday. |
