On the surface the motives usually seem innocent when bureaucrats and politicians start down the road of doing the public’s business in secret.
For Tacoma School Board members, it started as an effort to be nice to Ethelda Burke, deputy superintendent.
Burke was a candidate for interim superintendent. At a closed board meeting Wednesday, as members evaluated candidates, it seemed obvious the board wasn’t going to select Burke, a respected veteran district administrator. Once the negative collective decision was reached, board members thought it would be nice to let Burke know.
“I felt the fair thing to do was not surprise her on Thursday” at the meeting where the board was to vote on the interim superintendent, board member Kurt Miller told a reporter. “I thought that would have been unprofessional.”
What’s unprofessional is forgetting who the boss is. In being “fair” to Burke, the board cheated the boss (the public).
What’s unprofessional is making a decision (the decision not to hire Burke) you keep secret from the boss. What’s also unprofessional is telling Burke your secret on Wednesday, and then preparing to go through a charade on Thursday at the open meeting when you let the boss (the public) in on the decision you really made the day before.
In this case the board decided it was more important that Burke know about its decision than that its boss (the public) know about it.
Washington law says final actions on hiring – either positive or negative (as in the case of Burke) – must take place in public. The law says: “Final action means a collective positive or negative decision, or an actual vote by a majority of the members of a governing body when sitting as a body or entity, upon a motion, proposal, resolution, order, or ordinance.”
The Washington Supreme Court has ruled that no formal motion or proposal is necessary; even a collective decision on an informal proposal is sufficient to constitute final action.
This might never have come to light had Burke just played along and kept silent about her knowledge of the decision. But she surprised everyone by resigning Thursday at the start of the board meeting, before any vote. That was the tipoff that she had inside information the public didn’t have.
This board did the same thing in March when it voted in secret to give then-Superintendent Charlie Milligan a “satisfactory” performance appraisal that automatically extended his contract one year.
After that debacle one might have hoped the board would be more inclined to do more business in the open.
In the end the public gets the sense that the board is saying, in effect: “Move along, folks. Nothing to see here. We’re taking care of things just fine without you.”
Thanks for the offer, but we’ll pass. We’d like to watch when you’re doing the work we hire you for.
It’s the only way we can decide whether we want to keep you or fire you. We get to do that by marking an election ballot – the only act in a democracy where a secret’s OK.
ONLINE VOTER’S GUIDE NOW AVAILABLE
Our voter’s guide for the August primary is now available online.
“We sent questionnaires to every candidate for port commission, city council, school board and parks board in the South Sound,” said Hunter George, our politics editor. “That’s about 150 folks, and it takes about a month to get the whole guide put together.”
Each questionnaire was tailored to a particular race, so Orting city candidates answer a question about growth and traffic, Tacoma school candidates answer a question about the search for a superintendent, Fircrest candidates take a stand on Wal-Mart, etc. There’s also biographical information and contact information for each candidate.
Hunter and other editors and reporters continue to develop our online voter’s guides as a way to give candidates and ballot propositions more and deeper issues coverage than we could in the print editions.
Beyond the guide, reporters expect to write stories about the higher-profile races, including the port commission and the Tacoma City Council. We’ll also publish a printed voter’s guide – and post one online – in October for the November general election.
Dave Zeeck: 253-597-8434
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