APS Board to pass unknown Open Meetings Resolution

The agenda, link, for the school board meeting next Wednesday evening, shows they intend to pass the Open Meetings Resolution they "considered" last Friday morning in a Special Meeting.

The resolution is clearly on a fast track, though the resolution itself is still a mystery.  It was not made available to interest holders before the Friday meeting, link, and as there is no link in the Wednesday agenda, it remains unavailable for inspection and review.

UPDATE: the agenda has been modified overnight.  It now includes a link to the resolution; two days too late to comply with the law, but later is better than never.

I suspect that what they are doing is "legal".  "Legal" in this context means using loopholes, technicalities and legal weaselry to prevail in cost is no object litigation to prove that hiding the resolution while acting on it, does not violate the law - the lowest standards of conduct acceptable to civilized human beings; the standards of conduct, that every higher standard is higher than.

School Board Member, Defendant Marty Esquivel is a self professed expert in open government law.  I can't imagine the board is not relying on him for guidance on what they can and can't get away with when it comes to open government law.  This though, wouldn't be the first time he has dragged the board down a wrong path, link.

Unfortunately for interest holders, Esquivel is using his  knowledge of the law, to ensure minimum compliance with the law.

As a school board member, Esquivel is one of the seven senior-most role models of honest accountability the standards of conduct they establish and enforce upon students.

Those standards; the Pillars of Character Counts!, link; represent a nationally recognized, accepted and respected code of ethical conduct.  He and the board have abdicated as role models of honest accountability to higher standards of conduct than the law.

According to the student standards; if one is unwilling to do the right thing, even if it is more than the law requires or less than the law allows, they forfeit their good character in that choice.

Esquivel and the board are unwilling to be candid, forthright and honest with stakeholders.  That's why they hide resolutions and minutes and in so doing, forfeit their good character.

He and they get away with it because of people like Journal Managing Editor Kent Walz.

He and his counterparts in the broadcast media, are willing to utterly betray the trust of stakeholders who rely on them for the truth about the wielding of public power and the spending of considerable public resources.

For no good and ethical reason.

It's just the way they roll.




photo Mark Bralley
Walz caught by ched macquigg