You, the people, won a big

victory last week.

Last week, Superior Court Judge

John Langford granted The Citizen's request for a temporary injunction

stopping secret meetings involving the governments of Fayette County,

Peachtree City, Fayetteville and Tyrone.

A hearing on making that a

permanent injunction likely will be scheduled within the next month.

Arrayed against us in the hearing

last week were the taxpayer-paid lawyers from the four governments and

an assistant attorney general from the Ga. Attorney General's office.

A lot of taxpayer money was spent last week in defense of keeping you

from knowing what was going on behind the closed doors of your local governments.

The lawyers for the four local

governments employed some fanciful arguments why the judge should dismiss

our request for an injunction. One of the most ludicrous was the assertion

that no "meeting" as defined by the law took place when majorities

of all members of all bodies gathered behind closed doors in joint session

in December.

The judge rightly waved off

that assertion. His ruling affirmed that the secrecy of the tax mediation

talks ordered by Judge Stephen Boswell conflicted with existing state

law embodied in the Open Meetings law and nearly 30 years of case law.

The judge also pointed out the case raised state constitutional issues

involving separation of powers.

What that means is that the

judge saw a problem with the judicial branch ordering the legislative

branch the local governments to meet together and make joint tax decisions,

especially behind closed doors.

We agree with the judge and

believe that the underlying law mandating judicial supervision of local

taxation decisions is constitutionally suspect.

There is a more fundamental

issue at stake, however, in our advocacy of the Sunshine Law as it relates

to our local governments.

The law nowhere mandates that

local governments must close meetings for any reason. The law just says

that in narrow circumstances, local officials MAY close particular portions

of meetings. They have the absolute option NOT to close them.

So why do our local elected

officials almost always choose to push the limits of the Sunshine Law

and almost always choose to close meetings that could be left open to

scrutiny by the people who elected them?

Why is it that the default

position of our local elected officials is to close meetings, rather than

to open them?

Why do the city attorneys and

the county attorney (and the school board attorney) routinely recommend

closing the doors instead of opening them?

We say such a default position,

on the side of secrecy, is wrong-headed and inflicts damage to the trust

of local residents in their supposedly most representative governmental

bodies.

We wish our local governments

and school board would stop hiding behind the "exceptions" in

the Sunshine Law and start leveling with the people who elected them and

who pay their salaries.

We intend to do more than wish,

however. We intend to closely scrutinize the secrecy habits of all our

local governments and to challenge them when we think they have crossed

the legal line into unwarranted and unlawful secrecy. And we intend to

challenge them in the courts of this state if they persist in their secret

habits.

Our action in winning this

extraordinary temporary injunction against local government secrecy should

demonstrate to everyone who can read The Citizen's commitment to open

government in the sunshine.

We ask our local elected officials

to join with us and the people of this county in declaring a joint commitment

to government as open as the law will allow, rather than as closed as

the law can be stretched to permit.