When Tennessee lawmakers on Tuesday pushed aside the regular House and Senate calendars and decided to focus only on essential business before taking an eight-week coronavirus recess, one of the key items left on this week’s plate is a bill to temporarily amend the Open Meetings Act. The bill would allow electronic meetings via conference line or video conference during this pandemic crisis.
Such legislation could allow the continuance of government while still ensuring that local governing bodies – city councils, county commissions, hospital boards and the like – comply with Sunshine requirements. That should be true even if the panel itself meets by electronic conference or if it meets in normal chambers but bars or limits the public from physically attending because of the public health crisis.
This is good and necessary thing – provided the language of the bill eventually considered and passed later this week is properly worded to ensure important safeguards for transparency.
At least three members of our local legislative delegation say they see the importance of the measure and support it, as long as the final wording for those transparency safeguards “is rational,” in Republican Sen. Todd Gardenhire’s words. Chattanooga area Reps. Robin Smith, R-Hixson, and Yusuf Hakeem, D-Chattanooga, echoed that sentiment Tuesday.
In more ways than one, we are in new territory here. City councils, county commissions, hospital boards – even library boards and courts – are trying to figure out how to carry on essential government business in a public setting while also protecting the public as well as our public servants.