Do the public’s business in public

Note to all members of Utah’s public boards, commissions, councils and committees: If it is among your duties to make decisions on public policy, or even to recommend decisions to be made by others, there will come a time when one of those decisions will tick somebody off. Somebody with a lawyer.

At that point, you are likely to find that the best defense you can offer is that you reached your decision in the manner prescribed by law. And that you can document it. That means, among other things, that all briefings, deliberations and, most importantly, votes should be carried out in accordance with the state’s open records and open meetings laws.

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Thus it is troubling to learn that one of the state’s more obscure bodies, the Defined Contribution Risk Adjuster Board, has apparently pestered the Attorney General’s Office until the lawyers broke down and clued the board’s members in on a loophole in the state’s Open and Public Meetings Act. (The sequence of events sounds like asking Mom for six cookies. Then two. Then half of a cookie. Then a cookie you don’t really like. Until she gives in just to make you hush.)

Here’s the trick: Break your board into subcommittees, then gather a few members of your subcommittee, too few to constitute a quorum to do business. Then you can brush aside all those pesky notice and record-keeping requirements, shut the door, and wallow in your precious secrecy.

It is apparently within the letter of the law, and perhaps even on speaking terms with its spirit, to do so. That’s because the lack of a quorum for even a subcommittee makes it harder for anyone to cook up a plan of action in secret and be sure it can be voted into action later in a public meeting.

The RAB is charged with monitoring the health insurance plans to be offered in Utah’s Health Insurance Exchange. Made up of actuaries, insurance executives and other experts, its job is to make sure that the exchange doesn’t offer its blessing to any plan that is actually just another insurance rip-off. It’s technical stuff that seldom draws a crowd. But members were apparently worried that their discussions of the health profiles of group plans might veer over the edge of disclosing too much about personal medical histories.

But the law already includes exemptions for personal medical records, voiding the need for any quorum trickery.

As hot an issue as health insurance is, and will be, any ruling the RAB makes is likely to upset someone. And if any of those rulings are made in a way that violates the law, those challenging it will have been handed the best legal weapon they could hope for.

Follow the law. It’s for your own protection. And ours.