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Sunday, August 26, 2007

Ind. Gov't. - More on: Open up Commission on Local Government Reform

Following up on yesterday's ILB entry quoting from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, Lesley Stedman Weidenbener of the Louisville Courier Journal writes today:

The open-door law requires those agencies, commissions and boards to provide notice about their meetings, post any agenda and keep minutes of the proceedings. The public must be allowed to attend any meeting during which those groups receive information, deliberate, make recommendations, establish policy, make decisions or take final action.

But in this case, the governor's Commission on Local Government Reform is actually an advisory group, meaning it was created not to take any official action but to make recommendations to others for action.

Advisory commissions also can be required to meet in public -- but the law says that's only if they are "created by statute, ordinance, or executive order to advise the governing body of a public agency."

In this case, Daniels didn't use an executive order to create his commission, so it's not subject to the law.

That's certainly not without precedent. Governors and other office holders sometimes bring in groups of advisers to help them tackle difficult problems. Kernan did that when he was lieutenant governor. An informal group helped him create his tax-reform proposal in 2002.

But the difference was that Kernan didn't make a showy announcement introducing his group. Daniels made a big splash, appointing Kernan and Shepard with much fanfare to lead the group as he was trying to deal with a growing property-tax problem, particularly in Indianapolis.

The moment harked back to when the late Gov. Frank O'Bannon announced what he dubbed a "blue ribbon" commission to look at ways to reduce property taxes. That group -- led by two university professors -- had all its meetings in public, even those that included difficult deliberations and political battles over the right course to take.

Ultimately, that commission became so bogged down that O'Bannon finally told the members they didn't have to agree on recommendations. Instead, he just wanted them to offer possible scenarios.

That kind of public discord might be just what Daniels, Kernan and Shepard are trying to avoid with the government-reform group. Daniels said last week that he didn't instruct the group to deliberate in private and it's not clear whether he intentionally chose not to create it by executive order to avoid the open-meetings law.

Instead, Daniels said he's confident there will be plenty of public input on the issue.

"I trust Chief Justice Shepard and Gov. Kernan, the co-chairs, both of whom are extremely sensitive to the need for transparency and openness, to find the right balance here," Daniels said last week. "As in any such context, there will be the need for at least some private deliberations."

The website for the Indiana Commission on Local Government Reform is available here.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 26, 2007 12:53 PM
Posted to Indiana Government