Secret meetings, May 29, 2009
Today’s edition of the State Register lists three meeting notices that violate the West Virginia Open Governmental Proceedings Act.
All three are meetings of the same agency: The W.Va. Public Port Authority, and agency that has run into problems before complying with open meeting and public information laws. During the controversy a few years back over the authority’s efforts to build a new regional airport, the agency lost or settled lawsuits that alleged it violated both public access laws.
As we’ve reminded folks before, the West Virginia Open Governmental Proceedings Act requires agencies to send meeting notices to the Secretary of State in time for notices to appear in the State Register five days prior to a scheduled meeting. Every week, we list the agencies that didn’t comply, thanks to the Secretary of State’s office, which kindly marks those agencies with an asterick in the list of meetings published each Friday in the Register.
4 comments
How many meetings met the requirements?
I counted 68 — you can check at http://www.wvsos.com/adlaw/register/historical/2009/052909.pdf.
68 of 71 appears good overall - unless the ones not meeting the requirements had nefarious reasons.
Perhaps so … but I believe government agencies should comply with open government laws 100 percent of the time.