Shawn Vestal: Spokane Valley City Council needs to skin their cats in public

Could someone get the Spokane Valley City Council a copy of the state Open Meetings law?

You might have to explain it to them, too.

Also, could someone include a primer about basic representative government – you know, all the stuff that politicians claim to support but throw overboard the moment they get a horse in the race, like transparency, openness, and public participation? And perhaps include a brief history lesson about the dangers of overestimating your mandate – getting the naïve idea that winning an election means you are granted immunity from the rules?

On second thought, never mind. Based on the actions of the council majority in the past few months, the amount of remedial instruction needed would be too vast to assemble.

If you’ve missed the circus, let me recap: A new council majority of super-starboard conservatives has taken over from the previous council majority of merely very starboard conservatives in the Spokane Valley. They quickly fired city manager Mike Jackson without a word of public debate. The majority has since managed to run off other council members, and declined to approve an investigation into Jackson’s ouster.

The issues swirling beneath this run along what seems to be the major fissure in Spokane Valley politics: Call it the Knezovich-Shea fault line. Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich has run afoul of right-wing extremists and refused to pander to the bellowing of the self-described patriot class – which is basically led by state lawmaker Matt Shea, Bundy boy extraordinaire.

The new council majority comes, roughly speaking, from the Shea side of the line. One of their interests seems to be establishing their own police department, instead of contracting the job out to the sheriff, though they keep saying it’s not.

On this, Jackson was seen as an impediment. The circumstances of Jackson’s firing made it pretty clear that a majority of council members had consulted about the decision outside of public meetings – which would be an unambiguous violation of the open meetings law.

At the time of the firing in February, the majority acted shocked that anyone might see anything amiss. They insisted that when two members of the majority approached Jackson before he was fired and suggested that he resign that they had not done so out of any pre-ordained plan – that there had been no improper discussions among a quorum of City Council members that omitted the minority members and the public.

No, no, the council majority said. It was all just an incredible coincidence. Just one of those major personnel decisions that they hadn’t discussed as a quorum but that somehow required absolutely no public deliberation.

Here’s what Councilman Ed Pace told me at the time: “Our city attorney was involved and he was pretty thorough about making sure we were in compliance with state code. I’m confident everything we did was proper.”

Now council emails have been released that show the majority were communicating about Jackson and a possible way to dump the sheriff and run their own department in the days before Jackson’s sudden ouster.

Mayor Rod Higgins received an e-mail from Dave Wiyrick – a retired undersheriff and Knezovich critic – suggesting that the city hire a public safety director that the council could control. Wiyrick suggested that Jackson would be an obstacle to this. He also proposed a possible candidate for the job: fellow Ozzie critic and deputies union president Wally Loucks.

Higgins forwarded this message to the three other members of the council majority, but not other council members, with this note: “Perhaps another way to skin our cat. Would require a significant contract change.”

Pace responded, in part: “I would assume we would want a civilian with command and management experience and then a uniformed officer as his/her deputy. Or not, just have the Director of Public Safety perform all the functions of a police chief in addition to the other public safety stuff.”

This kind of email group is what you might call a “quorum.” This kind of deliberation is what you might call “action” by the council, under the definition of state law: “the transaction of the official business of a public agency by a governing body including but not limited to receipt of public testimony, deliberations, discussions, considerations, reviews, evaluations, and final actions.”

Actions, under state law, are required to occur in “public.”

Voting majorities of elected bodies are not supposed to be skinning cats in private. It’s the reason that all the hanging-out between former county commissioner Todd Mielke and fellow commissioner Shelly O’Quinn was a concern last year – the two of them could have effectively controlled all commission decisions with deliberations held completely out of the public’s view.

The law is surely a pain in the neck for the elected. That’s why the elected break it constantly. For all of the vigor in our state and national laws regarding open government, it is a very common belief among the elected and the appointed – from city council members to mayors to heads of planning departments to boards of regents – that secrecy is a vital and important tool for decision-making. Elected officials periodically complain that the law is too restrictive. How can they get any business done if they can’t plan and plot? How can they communicate honestly if they have to do so in public?

The people’s representatives should do the people’s business in the open. Even if it’s a pain in the neck. Even if means you have to do your cat-skinning in an inconvenient forum where citizens can actually listen in.

Or speak up.

Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com. Follow him on Twitter at @vestal13.