OSU and the Black Hole Award
Over the weekend, FOI Oklahoma Inc. selected the Oklahoma A&M Board of Regents and administration of Oklahoma State University for the organization’s annual Black Hole award, given to entities that “thwarted the public’s right to know.” Regents fired back Sunday in a news release.
Here’s more background about the award from an e-mail sent today to the FOI Oklahoma listserv by Joey Senat, associate professor of journalism at OSU:
FOI Oklahoma Inc.’s 2009 Black Hole Award is given to the Oklahoma A&M Board of Regents and Oklahoma State University administration for routinely conducting the public’s business outside of the public’s view.
The Daily O’Collegian reported in April that the nine regents, who govern five colleges and universities including OSU, secretly discuss proposals among themselves and with school officials prior to the public meetings. The student-run newspaper also told of the stance by OSU administrators that the public’s business conducted on officials’ privately owned smart phones could be kept secret.
The newspaper revealed that when regents object to proposals by the schools they oversee, university leaders withdraw them from consideration before the agenda is made public 24 hours in advance of the meeting.
The result was almost no discussion in front of the public and only unanimous votes since at least January 2006, the newspaper found.
Regents defended making decisions regarding their $1 billion annual operation this way because most of their matters are “routine in nature” and it saves time at the formal meetings.
“Otherwise, we’d be there for three or four days,” board Chairwoman Lou Watkins told the newspaper.
But open government advocates said the regents’ decision-making practices hide key discussions from the public and seem to violate the intended spirit, if not the letter, of Oklahoma’s Open Meeting Act.
Oklahoma legal authorities have articulated the importance of discussing the public’s business in public.
“An open deliberative process reveals rejected alternatives about which the public might not know,” according to an Oklahoma attorney general opinion binding upon state agencies. “Public access to a mere ‘rubber stamp’ vote is all but useless.”
And more than 30 years ago, the Oklahoma Supreme Court said, “If an informed citizenry is to meaningfully participate in government or at least understand why government acts affecting their daily lives are taken, the process of decision making as well as the end results must be conducted in full view of the governed.”
The Daily O’Collegian also reported that OSU President Burns Hargis and several hundred other university employees conduct the public’s business on their smart phones or cell phones.
OSU administrators claimed the related text-messages, e-mails and numbers dialed are secret. They contended that the ownership of the cellular device, not the substance of its related records, should decide whether those records are public.
But under that philosophy, open government advocates noted, any university-related documents created by officials on their personal computers would be secret, too.
Courts and attorneys general in other states have rejected the reasoning used by OSU officials, holding that it is the nature of the record created that determines if it is open to the public.
The Daily O’Collegian’s stories can be found at:
Regents Voting Record Under Investigation
Employee Phone Policy Violates Open Records Law, Experts Say
In response to the regents’ news release, Senat also notes that while regents do post meeting agenda online, the agenda of special meetings or committees is nowhere to be found.
–Paul
(Full disclosure: I am a member of FOI Oklahoma Inc.)
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