There’s a disturbing trend among tax-payer funded agencies that needs to be nipped in the bud.
If you haven’t noticed, public agencies like hospital and utility districts, school boards, city councils, and others have been taking steps to insulate — dare I say isolate — elected board members from the public.
Have a concern about something in your local school district? Don’t like a utility rate increase? Want to know if your local public hospital is making a profit? Have questions about city taxes and fees?
As a state resident, taxpayer or voter, you have the right to contact your elected official directly. You have a right to hear the answers directly from the “horse’s mouth,” so to speak.
Elected board members are a responsibility to talk with you directly, rather than through a hired mount piece. After all, elected officials work for you.
In many publicly funded agencies, public employees like school district superintendents, hospital CEOs, city managers and the like have been allocating taxpayer dollars to hire so-called “public information officers. And then they justify it to the elected officials who should be willing to answer your directly.
But more and more, public employees are interfering with direct communications between you and your elected officials.
To exacerbate the issue, many public agencies have webpages designed purposefully to omit direct contact information of your elected officials. In the alternative, some webpages provide an email that is routed through an employee — and not directly to the elected official who works for you.
The interference is prevalent among public hospital districts, where boards oversee tax dollars and policies that allow a hospital to operate.
In the case of a public hospital district, the CEO is an employee of an elected board. The board is responsible to answer you — the voter and/or taxpayer — directly.
Take Adams County Public Hospital District No. 3, for example. The district does business as Othello Community Hospital. Publicly elected district commissioners’ names and photographs are present on the hospital webpage, but there isn’t any direct contact information.
Rather, the webpage routes you to employees. The same goes for Whitman County Hospital District No. 2 in Colfax, the Mid-Valley Hospital in Omak, and the list goes on.
Many public agencies, from city and town councils to public utilities to school districts and more are starting to follow the same model.
As a resident, taxpayer and voter with a vested interest in how agencies in your community are managed, take time to look up which are hiding public officials from direct contact. Then demand direct access to those elected officials who are supposed to represent you.
It’s your right.
Keep that in mind as you head to the polls in the Nov. 5 general election. Elected officials who hide from direct contact with the public should be swept out of office.
— Roger Harnack is the owner/CEO of Free Press Publishing Inc. Email him at [email protected].
Roger Harnack is the owner/publisher of Free Press Publishing. Having grown up Benton City, Roger is an award-winning journalist, columnist, photographer, editor and publisher. He's one of only two editorial/commentary writers from Washington state to ever receive the international Golden Quill. Roger is dedicated to the preservation of local media, and the voice it retains for Eastern Washington.
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