Open teacher contract talks

Thursday, March 27, 2003 - If you're talking about public money, the public ought to be able to listen.

It's a simple concept, really.

A bill approved by the state House of Representatives this week would shed some much-needed sunlight on teacher contract negotiations by opening them to the public.

Now, they mostly happen behind closed doors, even though millions of taxpayer dollars are at stake.

Watching negotiations between a teachers' union and a school board may sound as dry as learning the Pythagorean theorem, but there's much at stake beyond money in those sessions. Vital school-district policies, such as class sizes, also are discussed.

The public, including hard-line union folks, anti-tax crusaders and John Q. Citizen, should be allowed to watch the process. After all, it's their money.

House Bill 1314, sponsored by Rep. Rob Fairbank, R-Littleton, and Sen. Andrew McElhany, R-Colorado Springs, still must be approved by the Senate and signed by the governor. Yet even at this stage, the bill certainly has proven the adage that politics makes strange bedfellows.

It's comical to watch Republicans call for more sunlight on public proceedings. They're usually the first to smirk and furrow their brows when a reporter elbows into a previously secret meeting using Colorado's Sunshine Laws, specifically, the state's open-meetings act.

And Democrats, who are generally very cozy with labor unions, have stolen a familiar Republican battle cry to back their union buddies: It's about local control, stupid.
At least one Democrat goes so far as to predict citizen upheaval should the negotiations be open.
"If we have these negotiations open to the public we're going to have a potentially dangerous, potentially frightening situation," said Rep. Mike Merrifield, D-Manitou Springs. He noted that school boards, unlike the statehouse, don't have a sergeant-at-arms to keep order.

Come on, Mike. Have more faith in Coloradans, especially your constituents.

We've survived blizzards, oil busts, tornadoes, floods and, from 1960 to 1998, a 38-year Super Bowl drought. We can survive teacher-contract negotiations without hand-to-hand combat.

Democratic insistence that teacher negotiations should be a local-control issue doesn't wash, either. With that argument, the state's open records and meetings laws shouldn't apply to municipalities and towns either unless they saw fit.

After all, openness is a state mandate. Are Democrats suggesting that cities be allowed to close the public out of meetings? Of course not.

"I think we should have faith that the school boards will do what they were elected to do," said Rep. Jack Pommer, D-Boulder.

Generally, we do have that faith until our public servants violate it.

Coloradans are trusting folks, but we want to verify by watching government in action - from the governor on down.