Spokane Valley City Council committee meetings are closed to the public, some residents want to change that

John Harding attends almost every Spokane Valley City Council meeting.

He has had an interest in how local government business is conducted since the late ’70s, when he started attending Spokane City Council meetings as a member of the executive board for the city’s firefighters union.

Harding said it was at those public meetings that he learned city leadership at the time was not prioritizing public safety like he thought they should, which is why he moved to the Valley a decade before it would incorporate and become its own city.

Harding still cares about how city business is conducted, and the retired firefighter said he still cares about public safety.

That’s why he wanted to attend a meeting of the Valley council’s newly formed Public Safety Committee, an ad-hoc strategic planning committee working to add more than two dozen deputies to the Spokane Valley Police Department, an action item in last fall’s consulting report .

When he arrived at Spokane Valley City Hall for the meeting, Harding said a city staff member informed him the meeting was closed to the public. He thought the closure was a violation of the state’s Open Public Meetings Act, if not legally, then at least in spirit.

“The whole premise of open government only works if you have coordination between one, the council members, they have to kind of understand what’s going on,” Harding said, “and then second, you have to have collaboration, I feel, with the people that elected them to represent us. And they don’t really give you that opportunity.”

Members of the public, including Harding, have raised concerns about committee meetings being closed at subsequent council meetings, with public safety being one of the biggest concerns shared across Spokane Valley. Getting more deputies on the streets is the stated No. 1 priority for the council, and it’s come up in almost every public comment period at council meetings this year.

Those concerns have been met with explanations from council members that the committee meetings do not legally have to be open to the public, something Seattle-based attorney Kathy George confirmed.

“Now, should they be open is another question,” George said.

George is a board member of the nonprofit Washington Coalition for Open Government, a nonpartisan coalition that advocates for transparent and open government. She said past rulings by the Washington State Supreme Court have determined that subcommittee meetings that do not have a quorum of the members of the governing body, do not have to be open to the public.

The 2015 state Supreme Court case Citizens Alliance for Property Rights Legal Fund v. San Juan County is the seminal decision that guides jurisdictions across the state on how the open meetings act should be interpreted. George argued on behalf of the former.

“That is the pre-eminent case on that issue, when you’re talking about subcommittees, and whether or not they’re subject to the (Open Public Meetings Act),” said Spokane Valley City Attorney Kelly Konkright. “That is the most authoritative case in Washington.”

George said part of the court’s ruling was that if a committee was given the authority to act on behalf of the governing body, the meetings would be required to be open.

The Valley has a handful of subcommittees that meet privately to discuss issues and bring them to the full council for a vote, meaning the committees have not been ceded any direct authority to act on behalf of the full council.

The Agenda Committee, which includes the mayor, the deputy mayor and a rotating council member, meets to set the agenda for council meetings.

The Finance Committee consists of three council members and meets as needed to discuss change orders to the city’s contracts, authorize city business trips for outgoing council members and other finance-related issues.

The Governance Manual Committee is made up of two to three council members, the city attorney and the city clerk, and meets quarterly to review and edit the manual that dictates how the council operates. The council is actively considering several changes to the manual brought forward by the committee earlier this month, including a process for admonishing council members found violating council policies.

The Public Safety Committee is composed of three council members, the city manager and the deputy city manager, and meets as needed to discuss the city’s ongoing efforts to hire more deputies for the Spokane Valley Police force, as well as other public safety issues.

While they may not have any authority, the committees strategize, spitball ideas and discuss issues in detail before they’re brought to the council. The committee meetings are where a lot of the work is done, which is why Harding said he’s interested in attending.

He’d like to know what is being discussed that does not make it to the open council meetings and believes Valley residents should be able to attend and share their thoughts.

“It’s the only way that citizens have an ability to have oversight,” Harding said. “And if you don’t have that, I think it tends to kind of give carte blanche to the folks that you’ve appointed to these positions. And if there’s no oversight, that generally doesn’t work out too well for anybody, whether it’s a corporation or a government.”

The Spokane Valley City Council could decide to open the meetings to the public, according to Deputy City Manager Erik Lamb. Other jurisdictions, including Seattle and Spokane, have opted to keep their committees open, even if they may not be legally obligated to.

Spokane Valley City Councilman Ben Wick, a member of the Public Safety Committee, said that’s something he’d be willing to consider. He said their meetings so far have been brainstorming sessions, and that having them closed made it easier for them to make recommendations to the full council on how to fund additional deputy positions.

“We’re not trying to hide anything, we definitely want public input into the public safety components and everything that’s going on,” Wick said. “We just wanted to find a viable way of getting this first recommendation on how to implement these new additional officers.”

The public will have a number of opportunities to weigh in on the efforts to hire more deputies next month at a series of open houses and town halls around the Valley, starting next Tuesday, April 2, at 5 p.m. at City Hall. A full schedule of the meetings can be found on the city’s website.

Councilwoman Laura Padden, also a member of the Public Safety Committee, said she would not be interested in opening their meetings to the public.

She said committees should have an opportunity to brainstorm in private and worries that members of the public could misconstrue those thoughts and spread false narratives about an idea before it becomes fully fleshed out.

“We’re not trying to hide anything,” Padden said. “The viable stuff, the things we think are viable, that the city can do or afford is going to come out at public meetings, with public input.”

Councilman Al Merkel has argued at past council meetings that Valley government should be as transparent as possible and said he supports opening the meetings. He would like the conversations that lead to a committee’s recommendations for council action to be on the record, instead of just hearing what the recommendation is at a regular council meeting.

“I think the public should be able to know if their council members are sitting in a room plotting to do whatever they’re going to do,” Merkel said. “I think the substance of deliberations is extremely important, so it’s not just the de facto answer after a deliberation.”

Merkel said he plans to make a motion to have the council consider opening the meetings Tuesday.

“Think of every public interest that would be served from having a meeting open,” Merkel said. “Well, what public interest could possibly be served by having the meeting closed?”