Mountain States Policy Center (MSPC) joined a public records amicus this week concerning the disclosure of state employee contract agreement documents in Washington state. Also joining the brief are Washington Policy Center and Washington Business Properties Association.
In March 2023, Citizen Action Defense Fund won its public records lawsuit against Washington's Office of Financial Management (OFM) to require the release of initial offers in collective bargaining negotiations after state employees and Governor Inslee had signed agreements. The OFM filed an appeal at Washington's Division II Court of Appeals, however, and the appellate court overturned the trial court’s decision. This ruling conflicts with other public records cases of other appellate courts – including the Washington State Supreme Court.
Our public records amicus notes:
"MSPC is an independent think tank that believes in providing research and fact-based recommendations to lawmakers, the media, and the public. MSPC’s staff collectively have decades of experience working on open government issues and understand that adopting policies favoring transparency at all levels of government is of utmost importance to the people’s ability to hold their government officials accountable.
Proposed Amici have a strong interest in the outcome of this case because all three are committed to the disclosure of governmental proceedings, including contract negotiations, in order to prevent and stamp out corruption and to provide the voting public with a full accounting of official conduct. Amici write to dissuade potential concern that finding for Appellant will, going forward, unduly deprive officials of the flexibility to negotiate without fear of 'the optics.'
And, as experts in public policy, Proposed Amici are well-positioned to exposit on this question, and to provide the Court with much-needed context into the forces at work in incentivizing good governance without overburdening public officials to a chilling extent."
The amicus brief concludes:
"As with the pre-decisional exemption, the seal on public access to what vendors the government has hired only lasts until the decision is out of the hands of the official or agency that made it and is subject to up or down legislative (or administrative) approval. All of these and other exemptions demonstrate the logic in drawing the decisional line at the point where the parties whose actions would have been impacted by disclosure are no longer empowered to act at all."
MSPC is happy to join this public records amicus to help ensure that going forward, citizens in Washington have access to all the details concerning taxpayer-funded government compensation agreements.
Regardless of the outcome of this case, serious reforms are needed to improve the transparency of public employee contract negotiations in Washington state. The Evergreen State should learn from Idaho's good example concerning government employee contract transparency.
Collective bargaining talks are the negotiations government unions have with government officials over salaries, benefits and working conditions. Because they involve millions of dollars of taxpayer money, they should be open and transparent. This doesn’t mean the public participates in the negotiations, but the public should be allowed to observe the process. This kind of process is not only good for taxpayers, but also for union members who are able to see how their union leadership is representing them at the bargaining table.
Idaho law prevents cities and unions from negotiating government employee contracts in secret. Democrats and Republicans passed this transparency law unanimously and it was signed by former Governor Butch Otter in 2015. Washington state, however, is a different story. While numerous attempts have been made to bring sunshine to the secretive process, government unions have resisted every step of the way.
Ideally, contract negotiations should be fully open to the public. But at a minimum, government officials should adopt an openness process like the one used by the City of Costa Mesa, California, to keep the public informed. The city’s policy is called Civic Openness in Negotiations, or COIN. Under COIN, all contract proposals and documents to be discussed in closed-door negotiations are made publicly available before and after the meetings, with fiscal analysis showing the potential costs.
While not full-fledged open meetings, access to all of the documents better informs the public about promises and tradeoffs being proposed with their tax dollars before an agreement is reached. This openness also makes clear whether one side or the other is being unreasonable in its demands, and quickly reveals whether anyone is acting in bad faith. It’s a hybrid solution that could be adopted by local officials if full open meetings are not allowed.
Until these types of broader transparency reforms are adopted in Washington, it is important for the state Supreme Court to strongly uphold the intent of the public records law and provide taxpayers and the media with access to government collective bargaining agreement details.