Disclosure is key to good government
This comment posted in the Letters section in the London Free Press, on August 9, 2010, with the headline “Closed Door Sessions”, [read here below]
Western Fair
closed door sessions
If the Western Fair Association has to disclose how it voted – how about our elected Parliamentary officials. I guess I now have the right to ask our Provincial Premier just who his financial advisers were and which ones voted for the HST. I should also be able to demand who voted for any increased admission charges for all the local soccer clubs that use public fields to play on. All fee changes at all our hospitals should be public knowledge of how each board member voted. You can add London Airport, the JLC, and Story Book Gardens etc. I want to know who on the University Board voted for the last salary increase of Andrew Sancton and what it actually is because the University also gets a tax break from the city. The problem with a witch hunt is where do you draw the line?
Posted By: R Clark, Delaware
Posted On: August 9, 2010]
is a letter that derides a London Free Press reporter’s efforts seeking disclosure of Public Officials’ voting records.
The letter writer here seems to dismiss an essential point: that accountability and good government is facilitated by open-access reporting and public oversight of ALL public tax-payer-funded entities; and ignores the fact that the Public’s “right-know” is an undeniable necessity for having an informed electorate appraise and judge the worthiness of Public Official’s service that is provided in the name of the community, and funded by the Public.
Yes, this means access to Official’s full voting records, complete meeting minutes, financial records of spending and allocation of funds, full review of Official’s correspondence pertaining to Official business and related side-deals and personal interests and consultation lobbying, all to thereby enable the public to review all consequential issues arising from possible slanted bidding processes, suspect contracts. and embarrassing court proceedings.
Such lines of inquiry and levels of public information disclosure, (and much, much, more) is available to many US residents and journalists in a number of States that have enacted explicit “Sunshine Laws” or in other words have enshrined extensive privileges to the Public so that the inquiring Public may know what is being spent, collected, decided, punished, revoked or otherwise enacted in its name behind in what was government’s once previously ” closed-door sessions.”
My comments referenced on LFPress.com blog post “Tight-lipped Fair out of touch”
Columnist Ian Gillespie pursues the issue of stonewalling the press in his blog In The Margin, with his post, Tight-lipped Fair out of touch, where he comments on city officials’ resistance to disclose their participation in ‘private’ Western Fair meetings while preciding over decisions that have public impact, as reported in the London Free Press article highlighted in my previous post.
Updated: Here are some additional thoughts sent to Ian Gillespie further to his piece “Tight-Lipped Western Fair”:
If the City Council members are denying you and other London media access to the WFA meeting agendas then perhaps they are in fact covering up more than meets the eye.
It has occurred to me, as it probably may have also with you and your editor and colleagues, that perhaps these agenda items were not only discussions pertaining to disabled person’s entrance fees but may have also contained points about Fair contracts for which Councillors or their friends and family are personally and monetarily benefitting.
Such contracts from which they could be benefitting could range from concession spaces to sale/purchase/conveyance of real estate in the area, or even city service arrangements, and therefore it would be in their interest to maintain a “tight-lipped” sidestepping of your earlier questions.
If this proves true, needless to say, this would be a very provocative and disturbing turn of events. It still remains to be seen if the Councillors can continue to avoid your straightforward questions in this regard.
Clearly, the Councillors need to be reminded by you and your paper that they have an ethical if not legal obligation to disclose to the citizens of the City what kind of business they are transacting in “secret” at the WFA meetings. They need to be reminded that as Public Servants everything they do in the name of the People by definition needs to be public.
I think this issue is worth pursuing.
London Free Press requests disclosure from Western Fair
Applause and Kudos to The London Free Press, doing its job on behalf of the community. This is the way journalism should always work: The newspaper vigilant as a public watchdog.
Also laudable, the paper providing open comments to examine each side of the issue.
http://www.lfpress.com/news/london/2010/08/08/14961966.html#/news/london/2010/08/08/pf-14961966.html
Fair keeps its secrets
(by Jonathan Sher, London Free Press, August 9, 2010. Contact: E-mail jonathan.sher@sunmedia.ca, or follow jsherLFPRESS on Twitter.
NO DISCLOSURE: Boss Hugh Mitchell has refused requests to shed light how a controversial decision about charging the disabled was originally made.
It was a decision that outraged Londoners, one that would slap charges on disabled people attending the Western Fair.
But if you want know how it came to be, or which politicians supported or opposed it, you’re out of luck — the fair boss says citizens have no right to know.
Hugh Mitchell, the fair’s chief executive, rejected a request by The Free Press to provide records that show how the controversial charge — one the fair’s board of governors reversed last week, after a storm of public protest — was proposed and who voted for it.
He even declined to say on which dates deliberations took place.
Asked for the basis of his refusal. Mitchell said again and again, “We’re not at liberty to do so.”
Asked why, he said, “There’s no law that requires us to do so,”
Asked if any law forbid disclosure, he said no.
Last week, public backlash led fair executives to rescind their plan to introduce a $5 admission fee to disabled people and their attendants. They did not reverse their decision to levy new admission charges for children.
Mitchell admits the charge on the disabled was a mistake — but he’ll oppose efforts to make public those documents that show who was responsible.
“We’re not a public company,” he said.
His stance stunned an expert in civic government, University of Western Ontario political scientist Andrew Sancton.
“I’m just astounded . . . I’ve never heard of anything quite so outrageous,” Sancton said.
The fair’s bottom line is boosted by public entities: It rakes in millions of dollars a year from government-owned slot machines at the casino at the fairgrounds and pays below-market rent on the city-owned property.
Fair executives should make as much information as possible available to citizens, especially when five politicians and former politicians serve as fair directors or governors, Sancton said.
“Any enlightened board and management, given these circumstances, would go out of the way to have a strategy to release the maximum amount of information,” Sancton said.
The Western Fair Association, which operates the annual September fair and other attractions at the fairgrounds, is — as Mitchell describes it — a “quasi-public” organization.
The association is regulated by Ontario legislation that dates back about a century.
Had the fair board’s and directors’ agendas been public from the get-go, the controversial charge for the disabled could have been scuttled before it was adopted, Sancton said.
Controller Gina Barber, who isn’t on the fair board, agreed.
“This has been a PR disaster for them . . . If they don’t have things to hide, then why aren’t they open about it?” she asked.
The secrecy comes at a time when it’s not clear what role city politicians played in hiking admission charges,
Coun. Cheryl Miller at first said the board of governors, on which she sits, wasn’t told about the new charge for the disabled.
Later, Miller told a local radio station she’d re-checked her agendas and found she missed a key meeting at which the charge was discussed.
The Free Press has phoned and e-mailed Miller to request copies of the agendas, but she hadn’t replied by Sunday evening.
Coun. Harold Usher also faced questions about his role as a fair director: He supported the board after it passed the new charge, but later said he personally had opposed it.
Asked for agendas and minutes, Usher said he throws them out after meetings.
Coun. Bernie MacDonald, also a fair director, said he’d ask the board to reconsider Mitchell’s refusal.
“That where the request has to go,” he said.
Mitchell says he’ll forward any request made in writing by MacDonald, but will personally recommend the board reject the request.
If the board declines to publicly disclose its minutes and agendas, the three city councillors should, Sancton said.
PEJ: Tracking the News Narrative
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Visit PEJ at at Journalism.org
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A comment on “Are We a Hindrance or a Help?” London Free Press 4/16/09
This is my comment on the opinion piece “Are We a Hindrance or a Help?” in the London Free Press, by Editor Paul Berton from April 16, 2009. In the piece, he explains his newspaper’s approach to the coverage of a breaking crime story which in my opinion, misses the mark on many levels.
Dear Paul Berton:
As you know, the first precept and guiding principle of journalism is to satisfy the public’s right to know.
The community at-large, and your readers especially, share an abiding need and certainly depend on this “right to know,” so that they may best evaluate how certain issues, decisions and activities—by individuals, government and other entities—will affect their lives, livelihood, safety, interests and well-being.
Credible independent reporting is the essential standard that provides citizens with facts, truth, information and insight to apprehend events of certain importance and urgency, to the extent that we may make reasoned and informed choices as free people in an open society.
The direct impact therefore, and the main purpose for reporting a crime story is not as you wrote in your discussion piece referenced above: to be “helping the family and the police”. Rather, your overarching responsibility as a journalist should be: “helping” the citizenry, by reporting on a dangerous state of affairs; and “helping” your readers be informed, alert, and aware; and “helping” them take appropriate measures to get involved, or equally, to avoid, to assess and to be secure against that risk.
By reporting and examining all aspects of the circumstances of this crime, you are “helping” not only by drawing attention to a sad human-interest story, but also “helping” by casting light on all the elements of the story that may yet have far-reaching and unknown consequences.
“Help” the victim, by seeking from every reporter to verify their widest sources: to ascertain any number of possible scenarios; suspects; criminal patterns and known offenders; instances of other abuse, and any wider victimization. Look at the family and neighbors, the wider community members, and their relationships, fears, motivations and concerns,
Look to leads from the public but surely challenge and condemn with every mighty tool of reason, those pathetically parasitic, carnival clairvoyants claiming psychic powers. Call them what they are: hateful manipulative scammers who prey twice-over on a family’s tragedy.
Look to “help,” by also examining the institutions mandated to serve and protect, and scrutinize whether their conventions and procedures will prove a praise-worthy success or show to have hindered and contributed in any way, to a tragic, failed outcome.
Point to any history of similar failings, and reveal the possibility of systemic shortcomings.
Finally, stay with the story. Call to task and analyze the intersection of the legal system with the process of justice, and “help” define the kind of protection that society demands.
The pursuit of reporting that aspires to the highest purposes of the greater good, may be the one way that we may try “helping” journalism succeed.
Creative Control International Inc. 