City Council in the hot seat
A Times EditorialPublished February 18, 2004
Tampa's City Council has toyed with hiring its own attorney - it doesn't want a lawyer who works for the mayor - and the timing, suddenly, seems perfect. As the St. Petersburg Times' David Karp reported last week, the council has met illegally for years in secret sessions with the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce. That seven members of current and former councils - many, longtime public officials - failed to concern themselves with Florida's Sunshine Law is a sorry commentary on what passes for open government. The state should make an example of them.
Anyone halfway familiar with government knows that Florida has long been a model for the nation in requiring public business to be conducted in the open. Public officials cannot meet in secret, their mail is open and business pending before government boards is open for debate before a decision is made. These requirements, collectively called the Sunshine Law, were intended to discourage corruption and foster public confidence in government. Of all the legal obligations, none is probably more known to officials than the ban on secret meetings.
The Times stumbled upon the secret luncheon last week, which officials said was a quarterly meeting that had gone unadvertised for years. Council members made the matter worse by downplaying what happened at the meetings and suggesting that someone other than themselves was responsible for ensuring the sessions were announced. Notifying the public is the city's job, not the chamber's. The state attorney general's office has urged for years that officials avoid holding meetings "in places not easily accessible to the public." Last week's luncheon in a private downtown club is the kind of place the attorney general had in mind. Even a public restaurant can have a chilling effect on attendance if a citizen feels he must crash a cozy setting or buy a meal to see what is going on.
Given what prosecutors and courts face on a daily basis, this episode hardly seems the stuff of hard prison time. But authorities should at least investigate and provide the public a picture of how the meetings came about. Tampa's City Council needs a refresher course on the requirements of the Sunshine Law, and the experience should be a lesson for other public officials in Florida. Embarrassment may have stopped a bad practice, but the sting of a formal penalty is the best way to keep this from happening again.