“…transparency is not up to the whim or grace of public officials. Instead, it is an enforceable right.” – Pam Bondi, former Florida Attorney General
We’re 10 days from Colorado Sunshine Law Week (March 16-22), part of a national celebration and recognition of open government, open records, and transparency. “Approved by Colorado voters in November 1972, the Sunshine Law ushered in a new era of government transparency in our state, establishing stricter rules for open meetings at the Capitol and providing the basis for the more wide-ranging transparency law that now dictates how all public bodies statewide conduct business. It also required lobbyists to disclose how much money they spend to influence legislation in Colorado.” (Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition)
One of the requirements in the Sunshine Law involves how taxpayer-funded special districts — of which we have many — conduct public business. In a nutshell, if you are a taxpaying citizen, you have the right to know, in pretty minute detail, how your tax dollars are being spent and how business is being done at every taxpayer-funded district.
The hospital board, for at least the last few years, has conducted a financial discussion before its regular meeting that no one from the public or media is allowed to attend. The explanation from the hospital is that the financial discussions are “complex” and could constitute violations of privacy and confidentiality.
If financial matters are being discussed among elected board members and administrative staff at such a granular level that patient privacy is at risk, that seems disconcerting.
Do board members need to have that degree of specificity to make decisions?
Does being exposed to that kind of detail outside of a public meeting or executive session put our elected board members at legal risk if privacy and confidentiality rules are violated?
Having a quorum of board members discussing business matters constitutes a public meeting, period. The remedy for boards to discuss matters without the public in attendance is through executive session under one of the legitimate reasons listed in the statute. (The hospital board knows this, as they went into executive session for one of those listed reasons at the end of Tuesday’s meeting.) In short, you can’t have an executive session without having an open meeting first, even if the only item on the agenda is an executive session.
A neighboring county’s hospital website (also a taxpayer-funded special district), has an easily located page of financial reports that includes audited financial statements and complete budgets, open to the public for review. It stands to reason that it must be possible to share a hospital district’s financial reports with the public without disclosing matters that violate patient or provider privacy.
That the “financial portion of the meeting” at PMC is neither held in public nor in executive session begs the question, “why?”
