A bill to tweak the Utah Public Meetings Act for some counties doesn’t make it far

A bill to give three-member county commissions wider exemptions to the Utah Open and Public Meetings Act was blocked Friday after opposition from Utah news media.

The House Political Divisions Committee voted to move ahead with its agenda rather than to vote directly on HB185 after debate. That blocked the measure, and sponsoring Rep. Brian Greene, R-Pleasant Grove, said he is not interested in pushing it further.

Greene introduced the bill at the request of some commissions to allow debate on problems they face, he said, and he had accomplished that. Counties with such commissions include the large Utah, Davis and Weber counties.

The Open and Public Meetings Act requires 24-hour public notice and posting of agendas for meetings of public bodies. Any time two commissioners — who are legislators and administrators — talk, they form quorum that may constitute a public meeting.

The law allows exemptions when commissioners discuss only administrative issues, but it requires any discussion of policy or law making to occur in a publicly posted meeting.

“Imagine if you were prohibited from asking your colleague to clarify an appropriations request,” Greene said. “That would make your job very difficult. It would make you inefficient. It could likely result in the adoption of less than optimal policy. That is the reality every day in three-member county commissions.”

“They are prohibited under our Open and Public Meetings Act from even asking those types of questions regarding policy,” he said. “That causes a lot of confusion, inefficiency and — believe it or not — even a lot of anxiety when … there is a realization that the law has been violated because of an impromptu comment or question,” he said.

His bill would have allowed conversations between commissioners as long as they do not “attempt to take binding action on the matter that is the subject of the conversation.”

However, Rep. Logan Wilde, R-Croydon, said he has heard numerous complaints from some commissioners saying the other two will attempt to hold meetings to obtain information and discuss strategy to box out the other member.

“That becomes really problematic in my experience,” he said. “I’d really hate to see this change.”

Committee Chairman Dixon Pitcher, R-Ogden, worried aloud that the change could lead commissioners to conduct much of their policy debate behind closed doors, followed by public votes without much debate or background.

Renae Cowley, representing the Utah Media Coalition of the state’s larger news organizations, echoed that.

“It is an impact to the public’s right to know,” she said. “Discussions of policy that are debated in private and then voted on in public are not in the interest of transparent government.”

She noted that Greene said commissioners told him such meetings often occur, although often inadvertently. She said the bill “only weakens any enforcement mechanism, so it takes a step backward in transparent government.”