Those laws are as clear as any, and they are of fundamental importance, yet some local boards and councils just don’t get it. On a regular basis, local governing bodies violate either the law or the spirit of the law by hiding the public’s business from the public.

The most recent case in the South Sound was the Tacoma School Board’s apparently illegal decision, in a closed meeting, to eliminate a candidate for the job of interim superintendent.

Last Wednesday, the board held an “executive session” to consider candidates; the next day, in its regular open meeting, it voted 4-1 to hire Art Jarvis. But one candidate, Deputy Superintendent Ethelda Burke, had been told after Wednesday’s meeting – but before Thursday’s – that she wouldn’t be getting the job.

The motive for that tipoff was understandable: Burke had spent more than 30 years working for the district, and the board members thought she deserved not to be surprised by bad news at Thursday’s meeting.

But the disclosure was evidence that the board had made a decision behind closed doors that – under the state’s Open Public Meetings Act – should have been made in public view.

The law is not fuzzy on what can and can’t be done in executive session. It permits governing bodies to “evaluate” candidates privately, but specifies that actual decisions must be made in plain sight. If Burke was told she wouldn’t get the position, some kind of decision must have been made in the Wednesday meeting.

It doesn’t matter that the decision wasn’t formal and wasn’t the actual hiring of Jarvis.

In a 1999 ruling on another Tacoma open meetings dispute, the state Supreme Court held that informal votes on hiring in executive session violated the open meetings act. That included, the court said, “a collective positive or negative decision” regarding a candidate.

If there hadn’t been a negative decision made about Burke, why would she have been told she’d been ruled out for the job?

For that matter, even the decision to inform her was not allowed by the act.

The open meetings act is not rocket science, and it takes minutes to find the high court’s interpretations of it online. It ought to be part of basic training for all elected officials. Too often, though, it doesn’t even seem to be in the curriculum.