An open door, not an open meeting

As we report in a front page story this week, four members of the School Committee and Westbrook’s school superintendent met in a classroom at the high school after a recent City Council meeting.

Those in attendance – Superintendent Stan Sawyer, School Committee Chairman Colleen Hilton, and committee members Don Perkins, Tim Crellin and Cheryl Roma – made no attempt to notify the public of their intention to meet. They did not notify an American Journal reporter attending a meeting in council chambers, just down the hall. We believe this is a blatant disregard of the public’s interest in what should be a very public budget process.

It’s unclear what exactly was discussed in the meeting. Hilton downplayed the significance of the meeting in an interview this week. Hilton said they didn’t discuss any specific budget items and said Superintendent Stan Sawyer was simply reminding them of when the next meeting would take place. She said the door to the room was open.

Another committee member present, Crellin, said Sawyer wanted to discuss a strategy for presentation of the budget with them.

Sawyer was out of the office this week and unavailable for comment. Roma could not be reached for comment. Perkins declined to comment because, he said, his work schedule did not permit him the time to discuss it and he felt it was the chairman’s place to comment on school committee matters.

Reminding school committee members of an upcoming meeting is something that can easily be done via e-mail or a phone call from someone in the school’s administration. It wouldn’t seem to be necessary to assemble members in a room together.

Any other housekeeping items can and should have been discussed in an open meeting – not an impromptu meeting with an open door. Period.

We take the state’s open meeting law seriously, and we would urge members of the School Committee and the superintendent to do the same. We criticized the School Committee last year for holding a public hearing on the budget after 11 p.m. at night.

Some later argued that few people often show up to the public hearings, anyway. That’s a weak excuse for disregarding a basic part of the democratic process.

The School Committee got off to a good start this year. In a series of guest columns this spring, Crellin urged members of the public to get involved in that process. We applauded that effort. Actions like these, however, undermine it.

We would also urge the members of the committee we could not talk to for this story to speak openly with us about what was discussed at this apparently brief meeting. Yes, Hilton is the chairman of the committee, but each of its members are elected independently. If what was discussed was insignificant, it wouldn’t hurt to discuss it openly and publicly.

A tax on health care

The state is now looking to private insurers to help pay for Dirigo Health insurance – Gov. John Baldacci’s answer to spiraling health care costs.

While we applaud any effort to do something about health care costs that have become unaffordable for employers and employees, placing an additional tax on private insurers would seem to make the problem worse before it makes it better.

Private insurers could simply pass the tax on to policy holders, adding to the already high cost of insurance. There’s nothing in state law that prevents insurers from doing that.

“We hope they won’t,” said Trish Riley, the director of the governor’s health policy office, for a story that appears in the American Journal this week.

Needless to say, that’s not too reassuring.

Riley urged employers buying private insurance to “push back” and demand that insurers not pass on the tax through rate increases. There’s nothing to stop them, however, from simply passing on the new cost without saying why. Insurers aren’t required to justify their rate increases.

The strategy Riley suggests also favors large employers with more negotiating power. Moreover, if pushing back against private health insurers actually worked, most employers wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

We urge the Dirigo Health Board and legislators to reject paying for the program on the backs of those who are already paying too much for health insurance.

Brendan Moran, editor