A reminder to council: Open doors to the public

With Lynchburg City Council gearing up for another round of appointments to the School Board, now is a good time to renew the call for opening up the process.
Last summer, the firestorm of protest that erupted after naming Liberty University professor Darin Gerdes to the board, effectively firing Vice Chairman Thomas Webb, shined the spotlight on council’s appointment process. It was then, and remains today, essentially a process that takes place out of the public eye and behind closed doors.
Council treats the appointment process for all the public boards it’s responsible for filling as part of the personnel process, keeping much of it private. Applications are not released to the public. The list of people who’ve applied is only read into the record of council meetings with no written list provided to the public. Council members decide in private which applicants to interview and then conducts those interviews behind closed doors in executive session. They reach a consensus on whom to appoint in private.
The only part of the process that’s done in the public eye is the actual nomination and vote.
That’s it.
Following the Gerdes appointment, The News & Advance questioned the seven members of council to gauge their sentiments about making the appointment process more open to the public. In fairness, there have been some changes, most notably the requirement of an absolute majority vote to affirm an appointee to boards and commissions. The Gerdes appointment, for example, took place when two members were absent who would not have voted for him; the vote that awarded him a School Board seat was 3-2.
During its March 25 meeting, council members will discuss the pros and cons of opening the interviews for School Board to the public and the format of those interviews.
In language as simple as possible, here’s the process we believe City Council should adopt:
- Release to the public each person’s application and any supporting documentation.
- Make available to the public a written compilation of all the applicants for School Board.
- Interview each applicant individually and before the full council, in public session and using the same set of questions for each person. In the spirit of openness, the list of questions to be asked the applicants should also be made available to the public.
Some council members, by way of defending the current closed system, have equated the naming of School Board members to a version of the personnel process, necessitating the behind-closed-doors interviews and the like. School Board members are not employees of council; they are citizens charged by law to vigorously advocate for public education in their jurisdiction. They report to the citizens of Lynchburg, not the seven members of City Council.
Other councilmen have said they fear conducting the interviews in public would keep good people from seeking the posts out of some trepidation of being questioned before the people. That’s nonsense as well. If a person applying for a position on the board that oversees the public schools fears speaking in public or fears being pinned down in public, then he has absolutely no business on the board to begin with.
Government and political leaders have no reason to fear the scrutiny of the public, if they’re acting with the public’s best interest at heart.