Keller ISD shows harm of officials working in secret. DAs must keep them honest | Opinion

The battle over whether to divide the Keller school district will stand as a classic example of the dangers of elected officials acting in secrecy.

The plan was shrouded from the beginning, hatched by a small number of trustees who attempted to advance the idea with as little public discussion as possible. It blew up on them when voters and other local elected officials demanded more transparency on such a provocative idea.

All’s well that ends well, right? Not in this case. The Keller debacle shows the need for robust enforcement of Texas’ law requiring that governments meet and operate mostly in the open. Officials have been trying to evade it for years, stretching exemptions for legal advice and personnel matters and quietly talking to each other without reaching the quorum necessary to require a meeting. Keller demonstrates that someone needs to fight back on behalf of the people, perhaps even through prosecutions.

There’s ample evidence that the Keller board members violated the spirit of the Open Meetings Act. Prosecutors in Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells’ office need to investigate whether they violated the letter of it as well and, if so, seek charges.

Two board members who weren’t part of the initial discussion expressed surprise at how far the plan had progressed. Even the pullback on the plan is suspicious. The board president and interim superintendent said they had determined the plan was financially unfeasible, so they were shelving it. Who decided that? Where and when did they discuss the information? How was it withdrawn without a board meeting and vote?

The DA’s office told us shortly after the announcement that no one had brought a complaint about how the idea was wound down. That’s understandable. After all, the battle was won, right? But even popular decisions should be made in public, and we don’t have answers about how exactly this one went.

Another possible remedy for government secrecy is a civil suit. Keller ISD is subject to one for the hatching of the division plan, and a judge ruled May 7 that board President Charles Randklev and a former trustee, Micah Young, must turn over records in that case. That’s good, but it takes resources and wherewithal to file and pursue a lawsuit, which might not be present in other instances.

State law lays out exact requirements for government meetings. It dictates how much advance notice must be given, what topics will be discussed and, crucially, details the limited circumstances in which elected officials of city, county, school district and other governing bodies can take those discussions behind closed doors.

Open-government advocates and journalists have seen a steady increase in evasion of the public meeting requirement. One popular technique is to have a “walking quorum,” in which discussions rotate among a handful of elected officials but always below the threshold that would trigger an open-meeting requirement.

Abusing the available exemptions is probably more common. Officials can gather privately to receive legal advice, an understandable provision that allows lawyers to provide frank counsel. But that’s not meant to cover extensive deliberation of the issue at hand. That should happen where the voters can hear it.

“We post a meeting agenda for a reason: So the public knows what’s being discussed,” said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, which works to defend open-government laws. “It needs to have some specificity, [and] the more important the agenda item, the wider the public interest is, the more specific it needs to be.”

If that’s thwarted, Texans are at a great disadvantage in holding their government accountable.

The law requires training for public officials, so they have little excuse for seeking to dodge it. But there are practical limitations to enforcing it. Keller ISD was an unusual case in that other board members raised the possibility of closed-door dealings. Enforcement sometimes is blunted by politics, as well as the fact that local DAs simply may have higher priorities.

One legislative change could help. Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, a Southlake Republican whose district includes part of Keller ISD, has offered a bill to classify a violation of the open meetings law as the type of offense that the Public Integrity Unit, housed in the state Department of Public Safety, could pursue. The bill won House approval on a hearty bipartisan vote of 131-13 and is awaiting a hearing in a Senate committee.

The attempt to split the Keller ISD would have been controversial no matter how it was handled. But the division, which could haunt the district for years, was made even worse by the secretive nature of the effort (along with, we will again note, the attempt to pull the whole thing off without an election).

Future governments could learn a valuable lesson. But as with any offense, they’ll take the lesson to heart if they see enforcement and consequences. DAs, who are elected too, should take note.