Students in the Snoqualmie Valley School District have all received their report cards by now, where teachers evaluated their overall performance for the year.
The Star thought this would be a good time to issue its own report card to local government agencies, evaluating their overall performance for doing more than what is required by law in keeping citizens informed about government business.
The cities of North Bend and Snoqualmie are earning excellent grades on the report card. The school district isn’t doing too bad a job. The Snoqualmie Valley Hospital District needs a lot of improvement.
Washington’s Open Public Meetings Act is pretty clear about who holds the power in a government versus citizen relationship:
“The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies which serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created.”
To be clear, all four agencies graded are following the letter of the law when it comes to keeping the public informed. The Star’s evaluation looks at which governments are doing more than the law requires.
Info just a click away
North Bend, Snoqualmie and the school district all post agendas and supporting packet information for upcoming meetings on their websites.
North Bend and Snoqualmie also have a notification system set up so citizens can sign up for whatever they are interested in. Some people might only care about what’s going on with the planning commission, while others might want to be informed about every single meeting, upcoming event or street closure.
North Bend’s notification system is done through its website, under the “notify us” button. Snoqualmie’s is done by contacting City Clerk Jodi Warren, who will put you on an email notification list.
The school district also has a notification system through its website, but none of the notifications tell you that the agenda and documents are available on its website.
Carolyn Malcolm, public information coordinator with the school district, said she didn’t think that was necessary because everyone knows the agenda and packet are uploaded onto the website Tuesday, before the Thursday meeting.
Would a new resident really know that?
Tweeting this and Facebooking that
North Bend and Snoqualmie, in addition to the notification system, also utilize social media — like Facebook and Yahoo groups — to alert citizens about upcoming meetings, agenda and packet availability, public announcements and community events.
Malcolm said the school district has just started Facebook and Twitter pages, and that the school board, which is currently looking at its policies governing social media, could decide to utilize those to let people know documents are available in the future.
The hospital board, despite a new website design, has not been utilizing the web to notify the public about upcoming meetings, agendas for those meetings or the supporting documents.
Administrative secretary Valerie Huffman said anyone who wants to receive the agenda and supporting documents for upcoming meetings should email her and she would be more than happy to send it.
Prior to the last two regular hospital board meetings, Jill Green, the hospital’s public information officer, has posted notices on Facebook and Yahoo groups letting people know where the commissioners were meeting, but did not say in those notices what was on the agenda or include any supporting documents.
However, the hospital board scheduled a special meeting June 26, and this time, Green not only posted a notice on Facebook and Yahoo about the meeting, but also included a link to the hospital’s website so people could view the agenda.
This is a step in the right direction in regard to going above and beyond the legal requirement, and it follows the same pattern of the other three governments, However, the link should also include the packet of information that will be reviewed or discussed at the meeting.
When asked if the hospital will start including meeting documents on its website from now on, hospital attorney Jay Rodne said he would like to see documents included on the website, but said he didn’t have a timeline of when that would start happening, and hinted that it was a financial consideration.
“The cities budgets are a lot bigger than our little dinky budget,” but he didn’t say why, or how much, that would cost the hospital district.
Seen it, heard it
North Bend, Snoqualmie and the school district also post audio recordings of the public meetings within a couple days of the meetings, so people who weren’t able to attend can hear what happened.
North Bend goes one step further by posting a video of a meeting on its website two days after it’s held, and the video can also be viewed on a local cable channel.
The city of Snoqualmie got points taken off in our report card because it doesn’t videotape regular council meetings like North Bend.
Warren said that is definitely on the city’s wish list, but financially, it’s not a very high priority, especially since audio is available.
The hospital district does not post an audio recording of its public meetings on its website, but Huffman made a CD available to the Star when it requested a recording of a specific meeting and said she’d do the same for anyone who made the request.
When asked why the hospital doesn’t upload an audio recording of its meeting onto the website like the other three government bodies, Rodne said, “I don’t know why.”
Snoqualmie City Hall, where the hospital has most of its regular meetings, is set up with audio recording equipment, and Warren said the Information Technology department “works its magic” and will upload a recording onto a website the next day, “free of charge.”
Rodne said he wasn’t aware that the city of Snoqualmie had that free service available.
“I think it’s a great idea and I think we should do it,” he said. “The more transparent we can make these meetings for the people, the better it will be for the district overall.”
Standing committees
The city of North Bend got dinged on points when it came to council standing committee meetings, which focus on topics such as finance and administration, and transportation and public works.
North Bend does let the public know when and where these meetings are happening, but it doesn’t indicate the agenda, so members of the public aren’t able to determine if it’s a meeting they should attend.
According to Malcolm, the school board does not have board committee meetings. However, the hospital commissioners do.
Commissioners are assigned to either the medical, finance or facilities committees, and the meetings are closed to the public.
Rodne said the medical committee, which includes hospital staff and regularly discusses patients and conducts peer reviews, is considered confidential.
He didn’t specify why the facilities and finance committees, which typically have one commissioner as a member, shouldn’t be conducted in public. He did say that under state law, committee meetings need to be made open to the public if policy decisions for the board are being made or if there is a quorum, neither of which is happening at those meetings, he said.
Rodne said those committees are primarily for staff to bring information to the commissioner, who then shares the information with the rest of the board.
“It doesn’t concern the public. They are work-oriented committees with the staff and a commissioner, and the commission decided those are closed to the public. The minutes of those meetings are disclosed and the financials are distributed to everyone,” he said.
In fact, a member of the public just requested some financial documents from the financial committee and Rodne said he hand-delivered the 1,500-page document to the requester at the special June 26 meeting.
Call me maybe
The final category the Star looked at in its evaluation is how available the elected officials are making themselves to the public.
On the North Bend and Snoqualmie city websites, there are individual photos of the officials, along with terms, emails and phone numbers.
School board officials were photographed in a group shot with no identifying information, and the website only listed emails, no phone numbers.
Malcolm said she didn’t know why there weren’t any phone numbers, “Maybe it’s because they all have day jobs.”
Nearly all of the City Council members in both cities also have day jobs.
On the hospital district’s website, photos and names of commissioners are included, but there is no contact information.
“I don’t know why they don’t have contact information on the website,” Rodne said. “Ask the commissioners.”
The Star did send emails to the board members. Commissioner David Speikers said he didn’t know why contact information wasn’t on the website, but he did say email is not a very good way to contact him.
He’s an attorney and he has to have a pretty secure firewall, which does have a tendency to block some emails.
“But people call me all the time and I talk to them,” Speikers said.
Commissioner Gene Pollard said he fully supported contact information, along with expiring dates of a commissioner’s term, being included on the website.
Rodne said even if contact information isn’t on the hospital’s website, “most people know how to get a hold of commissioners.”
But when the Star pointed out that there is a constant influx of new people to the Valley who might not know that Commissioner Dick Jones lives in Carnation, Rodne admitted that was a valid point and said maybe the commissioners would consider adding contact information on the website.
Why do more than the law requires?
So, what is the point of going above and beyond?
“We firmly believe in transparency,” Warren, appointed Snoqualmie city clerk in 1998, said. “We want to educate citizens about what’s going on in the city and about issues affecting them.”
Warren said there are laws that mandate that things are done a certain way, but ethically, they go above and beyond for the purpose of having informed citizens.
Susie Oppedal, North Bend’s city clerk since 2011, said giving the public more information than is required by law should be attributed to city administrators and Mayor Ken Hearing’s guidance.
“It’s always been important to them to keep the public informed about what is happening,” she said. “It starts at the top and works its way down. The same is true in Snoqualmie — good, strong leadership.”
Toby Nixon, president of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, said the reason keeping the public informed is so important is, “first and foremost it’s about building public trust. A government can’t effectively do its work without the trust of the public.”