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Complaints to the Nevada attorney general of violations of the state’s open-meeting law have continued to decline over the past half-dozen years, according to the attorney who investigates them.
Since January 2014, the Attorney General’s Office has averaged 32 complaints a year, according to George Taylor, the senior deputy who handles them. Going back to 2010, the office had been averaging 44 complaints a year. Five cases currently are under investigation.
He attributed the decline to better awareness by public bodies of the requirements of the law due to stiffer penalties and stepped-up training by him and others.
“We have witnessed an increased in interest in training for members of public bodies, and our office offers training especially in rural areas for local governments,” Taylor wrote in a report to Attorney General Adam Laxalt’s Open Government Task Force.
Taylor also noted the percentage of complaints that resulted in actual violations has remained steady over those years — between 27 and 30 percent.
I have served on the task force for the past several years, representing the Nevada Press Association. It has recommended revisions to the Open Meeting Law (NRS 241) over the past three legislative sessions, most of which have been adopted by the Legislature.
Although the task force formerly concentrated on open meetings, it’s now labeled “open government” because we have begun to tackle issues with NRS 239, which covers the public’s access to records.
We’ve met twice this spring to prepare for the 2017 session. If the attorney general decides to proceed with more potential revisions, a bill draft will need to go the Legislative Counsel Bureau by Sept. 1.
Here are some of the topics raised so far:
On meetings
- Whether the statute requiring “clear and complete” agendas needs to be clarified. Although members of the task force seemed to think the language is plain, some governmental bodies still struggle to get it right.
- Whether to revise the requirements for posting notices of meetings, specifically sticking agendas with a thumb tack on bulletin boards in offices and libraries. With technology, most people are capable of receiving notices by email or finding them online, so several people question the need for the old-fashioned method. I argue that Nevada does a fairly good job of notifying people of meetings, so anything added is a benefit. But don’t force people to go visit some government web site to find public notices; that doesn’t serve the purpose.
- Whether the law is clear on its applicability to subcommittees and advisory bodies. This is a pretty broad topic, because the attorney general’s opinions have generally held that the Open Meeting Law does apply whenever the work of those subcommittees is used by the public bodies to which they report. But there are lots of meetings of groups that advise, for example, city and county managers, who aren’t by themselves covered by the law.
- Whether the Public Utilities Commission’s contested-case hearings are covered by the law. This is a disagreement I’ve had with the PUC since the arrest of Angel DeFazio for trying to video-record a hearing.
- Whether the law needs to specify the public’s right to access teleconferences or video conferences. The issue here is not the right to see and hear those meetings — clearly, the public must have the same ability as board members. But what happens when a board voluntarily offers a stream of its meeting, and the audio craps out? That happened, and the AG got complaints. In that case, it shouldn’t invalidate the meeting.
- Whether to repeal the criminal penalties for willful violation of the Open Meeting Law. Although I’m arguing against it, the proponents make some points worth considering. One is that the penalty properly should be removal from office. The other is that, if there is a potential criminal investigation hanging over their heads, board members may refuse to cooperate with an attorney general investigation of a complaint.
On records
- Whether to create an intermediary step — before going to the courts — when a records request is denied. This is one of my pet projects, and I continue to explore ways to make this happen.
- Whether to sort the 458 exemptions (or whatever we’re up to now) in Nevada statute to public records into broad categories similar to the federal Freedom of Information Act. It would be a first step to try to untangle the web that is records exemptions and apply some logic to their reason for existing.