Tell me what has become of my rights Am I invisible because you ignore me?
This is #100, a milestone post in a weblog started over three years ago. That’s a long time to be writing about a subject on a sporadic basis. i started it to give us fodder for legislators who said there really was not an issue with sunshine law violations. I think we’ve gotten the attention of some of them. We’ve seen the formation of the Missouri Sunshine Coalition since then. And late last week, Attorney General Chris Koster added teeth to his pledge to take sunshine law violations seriously by filing his first lawsuit over a violation, citing the Northeast Ambulance and Fire Protection District for passing a resolution banning certain members of the public from public meetings and for failing to produce public records in a timely fashion to a request from the State Auditor.
(Frankly, the first part of the lawsuit strikes me as no different than a million other stupid stunts public bodies do in violation of the sunshine law. Don’t think that this is an isolated action. Read the archives and you’ll find dozens of other violations equally as offensive.)
The lawsuit seeks for the court to find a knowing and/or purposeful violation. It’ll be interesting to watch this play out. We have yet to have an opinion defining a knowing violation. Having one would be great, seeing as how the Missouri legislature failed to include that when it drafted that part of the law.
Meanwhile, friends at another association in the state, which is primarily funded by your tax dollars which are then redirected there by your local public bodies, is busy trying to put out the fires caused by a public interest group pointing out that your tax dollars are being used to fight a ballot issue which was placed there by your signatures on petitions. Not so, the association claims, but I haven’t seen a clear explanation to its members about where the dollars DID come from if they didn’t come from the association’s budget. Perhaps the funds did come from elsewhere, but perhaps it might be wise for the association to clarify that issue, if they want to help the public understand that they are not using public dollars to frustrate the public’s wishes. Otherwise, it sure looks like it to me.
I’m not particularly a Michael Jackson fan .. as a family member says, “I’m over it.” (Was over it about a week ago already, folks!) But in his own words, “All I wanna say is that They don’t really care about us….”