Gov. Katie Hobbs
If we had a buck for every time a public official has espoused transparency and then decided it’s way easier to conduct the sausage-making part of government in private, we would not need to worry about newspapers’ cash flow issues.
It’s easy, on the stump, to come down on the side of transparency and open, accountable government. It’s much harder in practice.
Comes now the Arizona Assured Water Supply Committee. It had scheduled a committee meeting, by statute open to the public, for last Thursday to discuss proposals for changing state water policy.
The meeting certainly occurred — but in a neat piece of bureaucratic legerdemain, it became a subcommittee meeting instead of a committee meeting. Net result: It took place behind closed doors.
Depending on which of these proposals is adopted, the result will become the basis for the first revision of laws governing water and development in many years. Gov. Katie Hobbs wants the proposals to be vetted and decided upon by the committee by the end of this year before going to the Department of Water Resources and/or the Legislature for full consideration.
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Apparently the governor’s deadline is more important than the governor’s previous promises to govern openly.
Having private subcommittee meetings will allow members “to immediately begin working through policy proposals to meet the Council’s December deadline,” said ADWR spokesperson Doug MacEachern.
The governor’s spokesman, Christian Slater, said the subcommittee is a “working group” and that everything will be aired in public once it gets to the full committee. The subcommittee will make recommendations to the full committee.
While that’s partially reassuring, it misses a larger point. The public deserves to be involved at every level of the process, not just after a “working group” determines an overall direction and policy is tied up with a bow.
There is an arrogance to the argument that government is so much easier if we leave the messy technical details to the experts, and simply roll out a finished product for the public to view. It’s kind of a high-priest mentality — “we get to hammer out the details, and you don’t need to worry your heads about them.”
We are accusing no one of impropriety here. But the streamlining of the process to remove public debate calls into question the impact of special interests in policymaking. It’s easier to put the thumb on the scale if nobody’s watching.
Two of the committee members, state Sen. Priya Sundareshan of Tucson and former Arizona water director Kathleen Ferris of Phoenix, are raising concerns about the closed meeting. They say the public should be in on discussions of these issues from start to finish.
Making policy is certainly more difficult when the public is involved. People will always have pesky questions. But that doesn’t make it wrong. It simply makes it democratic.
“Democracy is messy, and it’s hard. It’s never easy,” Robert F. Kennedy said. But a messy democracy is a much preferable to a sanitary autocracy.
Making policy is the toughest part of government. One could say that everything else government does is public relations.
And throughout this process, the public deserves a voice — an informed voice.
“The decision to shift the conversation to private subcommittee meetings is inconsistent with the governor’s January pledge to tackle our water issues openly,” Ferris said. “We need an inclusive, public process.”
We couldn’t agree more. In this state, water is everybody’s business.
The first paragraph of the lead item “meet Governor Katie Hobbs” on her official state government web page includes the statement “Governor Hobbs will bring transparency and accountability to the governor’s office.” To fulfill that pledge, Hobbs should step in and reverse this decision to take the public out of these important water meetings.
