A funny thing about transparency in government – attempts to circumvent it provide a level of transparency about how our elected officials regard the public’s right to know.

Mesa County Commissioners and the Mesa County Valley School District 51 Board of Education have both shown themselves to be hollow on transparency – despite giving it a lot of lip service – by making decisions in a less-than-open way.

We usually delve into transparency issues in conjunction with National Sunshine Week in March, going so far as to offer individual “grades” for local government entities on how well they “let the sunshine in.”

The state’s Open Records Act and Open Meetings Act are called “sunshine laws” because opening government action and decision-making to the bright light of sunshine – public scrutiny – is thought to be the best disinfectant against incompetence, malfeasance and negligence. Government functions best when it operates in the open.

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This year’s grading has been altered by things we’ve witnessed since mid-March – when we normally write about transparency. They’re so problematic as to reprioritize the grading exercise. This year, it’s pass or fail – with a focus on the two organizations that have decided that outcome trumps process.

Everyone – municipal governments, law enforcement agencies and the District Attorney’s Office – gets a passing grade. Not so for Mesa County commissioners and the school board.

For years now D.A. Dan Rubinstein’s office has been the standard-bearer on transparency. That hasn’t changed. But commissioners and the school board – after getting major props for improvements in last year’s review – are now looking up at every other government agency in the valley.

Local government entities are good about responding to open records requests – as they should be, since it’s the law. That includes the two in question. Agencies either hand over documents willingly or explain why they think the information meets an exception for public inspection.

So even though commissioners and the school board can claim to deliver on transparency in tangible ways – by producing records or having responsive public information officers on staff – we’ve had to devote a lot of ink in 2023 to the ways in which they’ve blindsided the public.

Note: The term “blindsided” should never come into play when a government is operating transparently because outcomes would rarely be a surprise.

The school board voted to close East Middle School in March with barely any notice in a process we described as “unnatural, rushed and contrived.” The district posted an announcement of a special meeting late in the evening the day before that vote with no agenda announced.

It took less than a month to go from a demographer’s recommendation to close East to a final decision with no outreach and public input limited to three-minute increments during regular meetings.

It had the feel of an outcome engineered outside the public’s reach. Mesa County’s handling of the continuing Jeff Kuhr saga is similarly rife with instances of commissioners acting in bad faith. They had a clear, but unspoken intent to sack the independent health board for not firing Kuhr – even as they went through the motions of negotiating over the health board’s plan to correct some deficiencies in the health department.

But the health board resigned en masse before the commissioners’ hired gun, a former Mesa County prosecutor, could present a case at a planned hearing to revoke their appointments.

We could go on, but to borrow a quote from Commissioner Cody Davis, “If you can’t be faithful in the little, you can’t be faithful in the large.” If commissioners can’t be transparent in all facets of county government, can they really claim to value transparency?

Lip service to transparency does not transparency make.

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel Editorial Board

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