Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 30, 1990                   TAG: 9004300240
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE RIGHT TO KNOW IN ROANOKE COUNTY

"It appears that I have bad news," County Attorney Paul Mahoney told the county School Board Thursday. His lament: a state attorney general's opinion affirming that if a public board creates a committee, that committee's get-togethers fall under the open-meetings law.

"Ridiculous," "inconsistent," "absurd," said Mahoney, as if the opinion had brought calamity upon the county and thwarted good government.

But what's so bad about trying to prevent circumvention of the law?

The immediate problem is that when two county board members and a pair of county supervisors met in secret earlier this month, they may have violated the Freedom of Information Act.

The bigger problem is the board's attitude toward the law.

Like many other public officials and their advisers, the county officials seem to view the open-meetings act as a nuisance, an encumbrance. They seem to think the law was designed to make the news media's job easier, and government's job harder. They take it as a challenge to their ingenuity in finding new ways to get around the statute.

In fact, all the Freedom of Information Act is meant to uphold is the public's right to know its own business. Citizens of a self-governing society, Virginia included, may insist that their elected representatives handle the public's affairs openly, subject only to explicitly necessary exceptions.

Consolidation talks have been specifically exempted under the law. Even so, negotiators gave public notice for meetings on the Roanoke city-county merger plan.

Not so when the county board members met April 2, behind closed doors, to discuss the school district's deficit. They asked the supervisors whether Roanoke County could advance $500,000 to help cover costs through the end of the school year.

The four officials reached an agreement involving a county takeover of the school district's finance department in return for the money. They then refused to discuss details until a week later, when the proposal was formally unveiled at a supervisors' meeting.

This is not the sort of business that public officials should undertake without the knowledge of their employers - the tax-paying public.

"If they [the news media] want to play the game that way, go ahead and bury them with a telephone book of meeting notices," Mahoney told the School Board.

But this is not a game. It's the law, and a good one at that.