When the Tennessee Sunshine Law passed the state legislature in 1974, we don’t imagine anyone involved could conceive of email, texts, instant messages and the like. Meetings of governmental bodies and deliberative communication between members of those bodies were to be open to the public. Period (well, pretty much).
In the intervening 52 years, much has changed about methods of communication, and the Sunshine Law has been debated and tweaked.
So it is that members of the Hamilton County Commission find themselves defending an 11-person group text that has existed for at least a couple of years and which, according to an open meetings expert, skirts the edge of legality.
Deborah Fisher, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, said some of the conversations shown in records of the text chat obtained by the Times Free Press are “a close call,” “could come close” to breaking the law and possibly “could be considered deliberation, or the beginning of deliberation, of government business through electronic conversation.”