This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
As much as we newsbeings natter on about it, people would be forgiven for thinking that open records and open meetings laws exist only to make life easier for journalists.
But that is not the case at all.
Such statutes as the Utah Open and Public Meetings Act aren't just there to help the press. Sure, we're the ones most likely to squawk if any city or county or special service district runs afoul of either the letter or the spirit of that law.
But open means open. And both the Open and Public Meetings Act and its sister, Utah's Government Records Access and Management Act, demand that governing bodies all across the state keep their meetings and their records accessible to anyone who is interested.
And, at one time or another, just about everyone should be interested. Real people. Residents and taxpayers. Who are likely to care, and invoke open government laws, more than any of the big news operations, which aren't routinely attending the meetings and which have other means to get information when necessary.
That's why it is worrying to read, as we did the other day in The Salt Lake Tribune, that some cities in the Salt Lake Valley are more likely — much, much more likely — than others to close all or part of their meetings to public scrutiny and participation.
The dubious achievement of being the city most likely to shut the doors of a government body meeting goes to Draper, the booming burg at the south end of Salt Lake County. An audit by the newspaper found that some 73 percent of the Draper City Council's meetings were, at some point in the proceedings, closed to the public.
That's a lot.
West Jordan, Herriman, Bluffdale and Holladay were also found to have shooed the public out for all or part of more than half their meetings in 2016.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Murray City Council managed to get through 2016 closing all or part of a mere 4 percent of its meetings.
There is some validity to the argument that the statutory levers to legally exclude the public from public meetings are likely to get pulled more often in towns that are still growing. Those cities are more likely to be buying land or tied up in lawsuits, two of the permissible reasons for a closed meeting.
But three-quarters of the time?
All that does is send a signal to the residents of Draper — who are more likely to be there and be interested and involved than any media outlet — that what is being done in their name, with their money, to shape the future of their community, is none of their business.
And the still-growing cities are those with the most reason to keep all their doings out in the open, lest sloppiness or outright corruption creep in and shape the future of those communities for decades to come.