Court Opinion

ID: 9548054
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:56:49.689414+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:18:25.900067
License: Public Domain

MR. JUSTICE CARRIGAN
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent.
The Open Meetings Law was adopted directly by a vote of the people through an initiative they approved at the 1972 general election. It seeks to assure the public a meaningful opportunity to participate in governmental processes by enabling interested citizens to observe the conduct of their representatives in transacting public business. The underlying purpose is to assure the people a practical means of exercising their “right to know” through guaranteeing public notice of and access to meetings where public business is conducted.
The majority opinion expressly recognizes that salutary purpose by declaring:
“Our Open Meetings Law, enacted by initiative in 1972, reflects the considered judgment of the Colorado electorate that democratic government best serves the commonwealth if its decisional processes are open to public scrutiny. Absent adequate and fair notice, however, the salutary purposes of the Open Meetings Law could easily be defeated.” 195 Colo, at 383, 578 P.2d at 653 (slip opinion p.3). (Emphasis added.)
Having thus approved the law’s notice requirements in theory, the majority opinion proceeds to countenance their blatant evasion in practice.
Obviously, if a concerned citizen cannot readily determine when a particular bill probably will be considered by a legislative committee, his or her right to be present and observe that committee’s proceedings is a hollow right indeed. New can afford the time and expense required to *385attend all the meetings of a legislative committee to be sure of not missing the meeting at which legislation of interest to them will be discussed. In spite of its lip service to the Open Meetings Law’s “salutary purposes,” the majority opinion condones a procedure that effectively eviscerates the statute’s notice requirements as applied to legislative committees.
The appellee committee chairman followed the practice, as indicated by the record, of publishing a list of all bills “capable of being considered” by his committee. In effect all bills pending before the committee were listed in the “notice” of every committee meeting. Although the published notices generally contained many more bills than possibly could have been considered by the committee on a given day, they gave no indication of the date or time that any particular bill might actually be called by the chairman for consideration by the committee. The notice published March 14, 1977, for example, listed forty-two bills, yet contained no hint as to which bills a reader of the notice might expect the committee to consider at its next meeting. To hold, as the majority holds today, that publication of such a notice is “full and timely” is to emasculate the notice requirements of the Open Meetings Law.
The majority’s rationalization of this result, by recitation of overriding “practical matters,” is singularly unpersuasive and flatly unsupported by the facts here presented. Undisputed testimony indicated that virtually every other committee chairman, in both houses, publishes a list containing only the bills that the chairman anticipates his committee can reasonably expect to consider at its next meeting. Normally each such notice includes only five or six bills.
This normal notice procedure, while not always providing exact and unchanging notice of the date each bill is considered, represents an attempt by most committee chairmen carefully to balance the purposes of the Open Meetings Law against the “practical matters” deemed overriding by the majority opinion. Moreover, the fact that such a practice is so widely used is solid evidence of the fact that the majority’s fears of undue interference with the legislative process are groundless. There is no evidence to support the argumentative conclusion in the majority opinion that such a procedure “interfere [s] with the ability of public officials to perform their duties in a reasonable manner.” 195 Colo. at 384, 578 P.2d at 653 (slip opinion, p. 5). In fact the undisputed testimony of a state senator is to the contrary.
In sum, I would concede the majority’s point that legislative committee chairmen, as a practical matter, are rarely able to predict with certainty which matters will be considered at a particular meeting. That does not mean, however, that any attempt to give the public reasonable notice of the committee’s forthcoming actions would necessarily hamstring the legislative process. A more just result, which would give effect to the notice requirements of the Open Meetings Law, would be to balance *386the competing interests involved here and determine what level of compliance with the statute would give weight to both “practical matters” and the need for fair notice to the public. Instead, by refusing to require any meaningful compliance with the Open Meetings Law, the majority opinion condones the appellees’ transparent evasion of the people’s will as expressed in that initiated measure. The public right to know is indispensable to conducting representative government in our republic. It should not be sacrificed merely to avoid slight inconvenience to a public official.