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In the fall of 1973, while I was a student there, the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley brought in a
speaker: Jack Anderson, then a famous investigative reporter and syndicated columnist, and of course a hero to us journalism students, who got our own session with him in the afternoon before his big speech that night.
Anderson explained that he'd missed breaking the
Watergate scandal because he'd been looking in the wrong
place -- something called The November Group
in New
York -- rather than the Committee to Re-Elect the
President.
Another question came up. Anderson had often got his hands on top-secret and other classified documents. Wasn't he compromising the national security?
He said that he had never compromised the national
security. When you look at classified documents,
he
explained, you'll realize that at least 90 percent of
the time, they're not classified to protect the national
security. They're classified to keep some politician or
bureaucrat from being embarrassed. And that has nothing to
do with our security as a nation.
My own journalistic career has never taken me to Washington and exposure to issues of national security, so I cannot vouch for Anderson's observation in that context.
But on the local front, he's absolutely right. The efforts toward governmental secrecy in Salida have nothing to do with serving and protecting the citizens, and everything to do with avoiding embarrassment.
Just when this one started is a matter for conjecture.
We could go back to 1998, when the city administrator,
Scott Hahn, wanted the city council to hold a secret
meeting about a personnel matter
-- some complaints
made by the public works director against a council
member.
News of that scheme leaked out, and we were able to get an injunction against the meeting. The council could do whatever it wanted to do, but it had to do so in public and be accountable for its actions.
The city, of course, contested the injunction and ran up
the legal bill before settling. At the time, there were
complaints that confidential
documents were ending
up in the hands of us jackals in the media.
That might have inspired the next effort. In late
January of 2000, the city council began considering an
official secrets act.
They didn't call it that. The proposed ordinance would
have allowed various city officials to declare certain
documents confidential,
and anyone who made those
contents public would be guilty of a violation of municipal
law. It didn't just cover city employees -- it covered
everyone.
With dark visions of the police kicking in my door, armed with a warrant based on reasonable suspicions that I had acquired confidential city documents, I went to the council meeting. So did the publisher of the local newspaper, and so did any number of concerned citizens. The council wisely shelved that one.
But in the current climate, local officials apparently
believed they can protect themselves from
embarrassment
by claiming it's a matter of
security.
On Sept. 24, Jed Caswall resigned as city attorney. Our local newspaper, the Mountain Mail, asked for a copy of the resignation letter.
Caswall was an outside contractor, not a city employee,
so this couldn't have been a personnel matter.
And
an attorney's resignation is hardly legal advice,
so
the letter should have been a matter of public record.
But Mayor Jaime Lewis refused to release it initially, until he got a formal request under the Colorado Open Records Act.
In his response to the request, he wrote that he had
considered the release of certain information a breach
of security,
and that the Mole
who leaked the
information is doing harm to the City. Releasing
information can harm negotiations, harm personnel or harm
morale within city ranks. It is difficult enough, during
these changing times, to keep city morale up, provide
security for the city and to protect our way of
life.
He went on to ask that the public-spirited Mole be identified so that the city could fire this person, or have the council take appropriate action if the Mole was an elected official.
Pretty serious, right? And all in an effort to keep the public from reading city attorney's resignation letter.
Did that letter detail the city's plans for protecting the water I drink or the streets I travel or the buildings I frequent?
Not exactly. Caswall wrote that the city needs to
seriously review and evaluate its present administrative
and operational organization and infrastructure, or lack
thereof. With all due respect, I have never experienced or
witnessed a city the size of Salida with such pervasive and
serious administrative, communication and organizational
problems.
Granted, if I were mayor, I'd probably want to hide that
letter, too. But couldn't our mayor come up with a better
excuse than some lame connection to security
?
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