Leave the secrets behind
There are no comments for this page [ Add Comment ]Wednesday, February 28, 2007
People who keep secrets prompt suspicion. It's a fact of life.
But time and again, government officials forget that, and because they do, we need to remind them. If only they would realize: By holding information back from public scrutiny, they always make it worse for themselves. And then they have the bad manners to be offended when constituents express displeasure with their behavior.
There are always examples of this kind of secretive conduct, but two recent cases stand out:
l The Ogden School District bought a piece of ground for its new magnet elementary school on west Second Street. The money for the purchase, of course, was provided by taxpayers as part of last year's voter-approved bond for new and refurbished schools.
When the Standard-Examiner requested the purchase price for the land, we were told it was confidential. The reason: A handshake agreement between the district and the seller, who didn't want that information made public.
But that's not the way it works. We don't know what's worse: That district officials would agree in the first place to secrecy concerning the expenditure of public funds, or that they would refuse to release the information after the fact. What part of the words "public money" don't they understand?
In fact, district officials were so obdurate that the Standard-Examiner had to present them with a request under the Government Records Access Management Act in order to pry the information from their reluctant hands. Amazing.
l The other self-destructive hush-hush transaction had to do with Ogden's Redevelopment Agency selling off three parcels of downtown land to Bootjack LLC. The RDA, whose members are the same as the City Council, says it requested the names of Bootjack's owners from the mayor's administration, but never received an answer. Nevertheless, the RDA approved the sale, only to find out after the fact that Bootjack LLC is owned by Chris Peterson, the developer who has proposed to build a tram and four-season resort east of Ogden in Malan's Basin.
The mayor's office said it didn't release the owner's name because it knew it would be controversial and raise eyebrows among those people who are opposed to Peterson's mountainside proposal.
Again, you have to wonder what these people were thinking. Are they trying to make themselves look shifty?
First of all, if the name of the owner was important enough to know, why did the RDA board not wait to approve the sale until it got an answer? And as to questions of open government, why keep Peterson's name a secret until after the fact? Doing that just makes it look like someone in the city's administration is running interference for a controversial figure -- especially since the information was bound to come out anyway.
Coming on the heels of the RDA's December approval to sell the former Shupe-Williams Candy building site to a company that later said it wasn't even interested in buying the land, it makes you wonder who's minding the store.
Furthermore, although Bootjack LLC paid more for the land than the city bought it for in 2001, the ability of the RDA to sell city-owned land to a buyer absent public bid doesn't strike us as good business practice -- or, more specifically, fair to other potential buyers who might have been interested. Maybe someone else would have paid more or had better plans for the real estate. Doing things this way, we'll never know.
Though history demonstrates that the public's admonitions do little good, we will continue to plead with government leaders to resist the urge to be secretive concerning the people's business. It makes government look bad and deepens public cynicism. Besides, it's the wrong thing to do.
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