(C) South Dakota Searchlight
This story was originally published by South Dakota Searchlight and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Jackley’s bill signals resurrection of Open Meetings Commission [1]

['Dana Hess', 'More From Author', 'January']

Date: 2024-01-11

South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley made some news last month when he announced the five bills he’s backing during the 2024 legislative session. Most of the headlines generated by his announcement concerned the attempt to regulate a livestock tranquilizer being used by drug dealers or outlawing the use of artificial intelligence to create child pornography.

Listed later in the stories was information about a Jackley-backed bill that will be of interest to everyone in the state who cares about open government. Senate Bill 26 calls for allowing assistant state’s attorneys to serve on the Open Meetings Commission. Currently, the attorney general appoints five state’s attorneys to serve on the commission.

Opening up the commission’s membership to assistant state’s attorneys is not the big news, however. The news is that Jackley must intend to breathe some new life into a commission that looks like it has been dormant for far too long.

Appealing to the commission is the only real recourse that citizens have when they believe that a local government body has run afoul of the state’s open meetings law. Unfortunately, the commission seems to have been inactive since the dark days of Jason Ravnsborg’s tenure as attorney general.

The nature of Jackley’s proposed legislation points toward what must be the difficulty in recruiting state’s attorneys to serve on the commission. On the attorney general’s website, the last commission meeting minutes posted are from Dec. 31, 2020. From 2011 to 2020, the commission met at least once a year and sometimes as many as four times a year to consider open meetings law violations. That amount of activity shows how important it is to get the Open Meetings Commission up and running again.

The Open Meetings Commission was founded in 2004 when Larry Long was serving as attorney general. The commission, which rules on whether local boards or councils have broken the open meetings law, was created because of the toothless nature of the South Dakota law governing those meetings. Prior to the creation of the commission, citizens who believed that their local board was circumventing the open meetings law had only one recourse: Convince the local state’s attorney to take on the case.

Violation of the open meetings law is a Class 2 misdemeanor punishable by 30 days in jail, a $500 fine or both. No one has been prosecuted for a violation of that law. Ever.

The Open Meetings Commission, while it can’t punish the errant city council or school board, can publish a reprimand if it finds that they violated the law. That’s what it has come to in South Dakota. We lack the fortitude to punish open meetings law offenders — officials who choose to illegally conduct public business in secret. The best we can do is point out their transgressions in the hopes that they will be shamed into future compliance. Or perhaps they will just be more discreet the next time they break the law.

The lack of prosecution for these offenses has to do with the nature of elected officials. It’s hard to imagine the local state’s attorney bringing the county commission up on charges for an open meetings law violation since part of the state’s attorney’s job is advising and working with the county commissioners. In smaller communities, the state’s attorney may also act as an attorney for the local school board or city council. It’s easy to imagine a state’s attorney’s hesitance at having to prosecute a steady, lucrative client in a place where clients like that are hard to find.

It’s good news that Jackley is seeking to broaden the membership of the Open Meetings Commission. That can only mean that he wants to get it back in action. This move will be good for open government even if the best the state can do for an open meetings violation is a public shaming.

In a perfect world, these violators wouldn’t just be publicly disgraced, they’d be prosecuted. On their own, state’s attorneys have been less than valiant when it comes to prosecuting boards that break the open meetings law. Perhaps as a group, on the Open Meetings Commission, they should have the power to enforce the law and punish the offenders. That would do far more for the cause of open government than the light slap on the wrist that offenders currently have to endure.

If that’s too great a leap for the current attorney general, perhaps he would consider this: Amend Senate Bill 26 to include the addition of not just assistant state’s attorneys but members of the public, open government advocates and members of the media. The membership of the Open Meetings Commission should be open to all South Dakotans since all South Dakotans have a stake in protecting open government.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://southdakotasearchlight.com/2024/01/11/jackleys-bill-signals-resurrection-of-open-meetings-commission/

Published and (C) by South Dakota Searchlight
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/sdsearchlight/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.