Public role is vital in meetings

The Northwest Montana Association of Realtors has taken the unusual step of threatening the Flathead County Planning Board with a lawsuit over how the board runs its meetings, in particular the Nov. 1 meeting on riparian setbacks.

The Realtors, along with others who have attended the meetings, have concerns that the Planning Board is not living up to the spirit of Montana's rather stringent open meetings law.

County representatives suggest that because the Nov. 1 meeting was actually a workshop and not an action meeting, the Planning Board didn't violate any rules.

Maybe so. But the Realtors' group and others who have complained that the board did not fully allow public participation at the meeting have a strong case, even if they perhaps could not prevail in a courtroom.

The fact is that Montana law requires local governments to open all meetings to the public and allow reasonable participation before reaching a decision. It is true that no decision was being reached at this particular meeting because it was a workshop, but it is also true that Montana's Constitution guarantees all people the right to observe the deliberations of public bodies.

Some present at the Nov. 1 meeting said that the planning board did not accommodate the large crowd by holding discussions with any kind of amplification. If those present can't hear the discussion, then it is certainly a legitimate question to ask whether they are really being allowed to "observe" the deliberations.

But let's step back a moment and consider the bigger picture.

The Planning Board and the county commissioners are making decisions that matter to thousands of people, residents who live here today and residents who will live here tomorrow or the next day.

It just makes sense that these public servants would go out of there way to make sure that the people they represent are being included in the process - not just because the law demands it, but because fairness demands it.

If our public officials would sometimes imagine themselves on the other side of the table, then perhaps they would expect the same courtesy, the same right of participation, the same openness that the Realtors are seeking.

It certainly would be easy enough to hold an additional meeting on the topic of riparian setbacks with the same agenda as the Nov. 1 meeting. Probably no news would be made at the meeting, but if it made the citizens feel like their government was paying attention to them, that might be news enough.