Looking forward to resolution to locked doors issue

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October 24, 2009

Anonymous The Meridian Star Sat Oct 24, 2009, 11:24 PM CDT

When you're dealing with the public and, more importantly, taxpayer dollars, it's best to be careful that business be done the way our framers intended — in public.

This past week, we learned that the doors to the Raymond P. Davis Courthouse Annex were locked during meeting times of the Lauderdale County Board of Supervisors. The reason: the doors are controlled by a timer. If the timer is set for a certain time and the meetings are not over, the public is locked out. The locked doors are a violation of the state's open meetings law. Now that the door situation has been brought to their attention, county officials say they will make sure the doors are open and that meetings are easily accessible to the public during meeting times. We look forward to that change.

Aside from the locked doors, the board also went behind closed doors for more than an hour to discuss "pending litigation," one of the reasons under the law that governing boards can meet behind closed doors. While this is a legitimate cause for privacy, it was the second consecutive meeting the board has met in private.

Jeanni Atkins, executive director of the Mississippi Center for Freedom of Information, said it's important for public officials to take the state's open meetings law seriously. And ignorance of the law is not an excuse, she said.

"I think too often it has become the norm for government officials across the state to use executive sessions," Atkins said. "Closed meetings should be used on rare occasions, not every meeting. That was not the intent of the law."

We look forward to future meetings where such closed-door meetings are not used.

On a good note, the Meridian City Council did not meet behind closed doors this week, their second such meeting without a closed session. We applaud council members for their efforts to make a change and ensure taxpayer business is done in front of taxpayers.

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