This morning’s Coeur d’Alene Press editorial entitled Open eyes – and meetings strives desperately to discredit local education watchdog Mary Jo Finney’s complaint that the Board of Trustees of School District 271 engaged in an unlawful meeting while a quorum of their members were in Boise.

The Press editorial includes this statement:  “The fact that the district legally posted notice of a meeting in Boise that was central to Finney’s complaint weakened her argument, if it didn’t kill it altogether.”

Oh, really?

For the record, Google Maps’ most direct route from Coeur d’Alene to Boise shows that the driving distance is approximately 378 miles with a drive time of approximately 6 hours 59 minutes.

OpenCdA will assume the Press is accurately reporting that “…the district legally posted notice of a meeting in Boise…”.   We will take that as an accurate admission, even by the Press, that a meeting not only took place but that the meeting was also  scheduled in advance.   To take that one step further, if the School District did post the stautorily-required notice of the Boise meeting, then it was acknowledging  that the meeting in Boise was in fact, a meeting required by law to be noticed.  Idaho Code §67-2341(6) defines such a meeting as “… the convening of a governing body of a public agency to make a decision or to deliberate toward a decision on any matter.”  Thus, the only reason to properly notice the meeting was because the quorum of the School District Board of Trustees attending the meeting intended in advance to deliberate toward a decision and possibly make one.  So instead of successfully discrediting Finney’s assertion that the alleged meeting took place illegally, the Coeur d’Alene Press has in fact admitted and established that it did. 

But what about the Press editorial’s statement that because the meeting was legally noticed, presumably as required in Idaho Code §67-2343,  Finney’s argument was fatally weakened?  The Press editors should have read further into the Idaho Open Meeting Law, because there’s another requirement in the Open Meeting Law that the Coeur d’Alene Press omitted from its editorial.

The meeting which the Press defended as properly noticed must also have been reasonably accessible (our words) to the public who might have an interest in attending.  The clearest and simplest explanation of that requirement can be found in the Idaho Open Meeting Law Manual, November 2011 edition, published by the Idaho Attorney General’s Office and available online at the immediately preceding link.  The relevant portion is on page 15 of that Manual, and it states:

Another limitation is that the body cannot make it practically impossible for the public to be present at a meeting.  For example, in Noble v. Kootenai County, a board of commissioners conducted a site visit to a proposed subdivision.  When arriving at the site, the board intentionally avoided a group that was gathered near the entrance to the site location and conducted its site visit outside the group’s hearing.  The court held that this was a violation, stating that “Idaho’s open meeting laws … are designed to allow the public to be present during agency hearings.  At the very least this means that the public must be permitted to get close enough to the hearing body to hear what is being said.” [see Noble v. Kootenai County, 148 Idaho 937, 943, 231 P.3d 1034, 1040 (2010)]

That’s why early in our post we included the driving distance and driving time from Coeur d’Alene to Boise.  OpenCdA submits that for the Board of Trustees of School District 271 to conduct a public meeting approximately 378 miles and 6 hours 59 minutes away in Boise, Idaho, makes it practically impossible for the public from Kootenai County to be present at the meeting.

Whether in editorial comment or hard news stories, deception by omission of relevant facts can be just as misleading to trusting readers as deception by intentional factual misstatement.  If it is done intentionally, it is no longer news or even credible commentary; it is disinformation and propaganda.