Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript of an episode of Northwest Now created by KBTC Managing Editor Tom Layson, who serves as producer and host for the program. The interviews were recorded as state lawmakers sought to pass legislation that would have made many of their records exempt from public disclosure laws. The measure was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Jay Inslee. The full program can be watched below.
Despite all the forces aligned against open government, however, many fight the good fight, and they include the team at The Chronicle in Lewis County, where consistent reporting and strong editorials resulted in a more transparent local government.
It feels like people live a little closer to the power that governs them in places like Centralia and Lewis County, where a reporter can still walk a beat and get a scoop just talking around town a little.
For more than 125 years, The Chronicle has told this area's story, making judicious use of Washington's strong public records and open meetings laws to report the news and hold power accountable.
Last year, it was reporter Natalie Johnson who found out that something was a little amiss in county government. It turns out the county commission had just conveniently decided to declare itself in session all day, every day, instead of having to bother with putting out meeting agendas and notices as required by the Open Public Meetings Act.
“Exactly,” said Chronicle Assistant Editor Natalie Johnson. “They're in a state of perpetual quorum, and they're calling that a perpetual open meeting that is technically open to the public, but unless they're noticing exactly what they're going to talk about, nobody knows when they should show up because you might show up at nine o'clock on a Wednesday, and nothing's happening. And so the only way for a reporter or a member of the public to know what they're doing and to be there when they're having a discussion on anything in particular is to sit in their office and just camp there 40 hours a week, which is not realistic even for a newspaper reporter. So from that point, we just kept pushing at it and reporting on it. And eventually, they changed their policy.”
Johnson says the result is better, timelier information, and that translates into more and better coverage of county government for the thousands of people who rely on The Chronicle for all of their local news.
Another result was the Key Award from the Washington Coalition for Open Government, recognizing Johnson, editorial writer Brittany Voie, who backed up the reported on the issue with a series of editorials asking for change, and editor Eric Schwartz, who I just happened to speak with on the day more than a dozen newspapers in Washington, including The Chronicle, put editorials out on the front page denouncing the Legislature's move to exempt itself from the Public Records Act.
“I think as a representative of our editorial board ... what they've done is disgraceful in timing and in aim,” Schwartz said prior to the governor’s veto of the legislation. “I think it's a pretty obvious attempt to sidestep a lawsuit that's been brought by most media organizations in the state, or most print media, anyways. And I think it's big enough to where it is something that the regular Joe's going to care about on the streets. As a local newspaper, we try to hold our public officials responsible at the city and county level, and we've seen a good response to that from our readers, and I think to see that the same laws aren't being followed by state lawmakers is kind of an affront to democracy.”
A democracy, by the way, only as good as it is transparent, and that's why both of the bedrock transparency-related laws in Washington are so darned important — the Open Public Meetings Act, or OPMA, and the Public Records Act, or PRA.
“They're so much the foundation of everything we do between public records and public meetings,” Schwartz said. “Knowing what our elected officials are doing, knowing when they're doing it, and how they're doing it, and who they're doing it with, we're not going to be able to find that out from another source. There's not another media organization where we can call and say, ‘Hey, you have more resources. What are the Lewis County commissioners up to?’ So if we don't do it ourselves, it's just not going to get done. And we do see it as a responsibility to enforce those laws because, frankly, there's not anyone else that's going to do it. And if we don't know when they're meeting, then we don't know what records to request. And likewise, if we don't know what records exist, we often don't know when they're meeting, so they play in together.”
In the end, there's an interesting twist to this story. It turns out Natalie Johnson is the granddaughter of KOMO-TV legend Bryan Johnson, who helped write the Open Public Meetings Act back in 1971. So while Natalie's reporting enforced the very law her grandfather worked to write, in the end, she takes a fairly benign view of the county commission's legal faux pas.
“These are average citizens. They're not career politicians,” Johnson said. “They're not people who go to school for this … I think they're honestly doing their best, and I think that that's sometimes not good enough. And so it's not so much that I think small government elected officials want to be secret just for the sneaky reason of being secret. These people aren't sociopaths, you know. They're not trying to be bad people. I think that they go down the easier path. And the easier path sometimes is to talk about things outside of a public meeting or without properly notifying the public. I think it's really taking the quick and easy path.”
