Grandstanding senator wants $1,000 fine for local government officials who meet in secret, but not legislators

Sen. Mia Costello, a world-class opponent of the evils of Big Government, wants local government officials to face fines of up to $1,000 for attending illegal secret meetings.

In a just world, Costello’s bill, SB 15, would be filed under “Hypocrite.”

But now that she is on the record for open meetings, Costello should immediately write a personal check for hundreds of thousands, paying the penalty for the thousands of secret meetings she has attended as a legislator, all made possible by the Legislature exempting itself from the Open Meetings Act.

Alaska legislators need to follow the open meetings rules they require for local government. That the grandstanding senator failed to introduce that bill and apply the $1,000 fine to legislators is evidence that this is just a Republican stunt aimed at the Anchorage assembly over procedures adopted during the pandemic.

The Open Meetings Law once applied to the Legislature, but in 1994 lawmakers “resolved the awkward discrepancy between the OMA's language, indicating the legislature was subject to the act, and the reality that this provision was unenforceable, by removing references in the OMA to coverage of the state legislature,” according to a history by private attorney John McKay, Alaska’s leading authority on the law.

A 1987 court decision about separation of powers prevented enforcement of the law as it applied to the Legislature.

But Alaska local governments are mostly conscientious about public meetings, conflict of interest provisions and other rules because the law applies to them and it is enforced.

In the past, Costello has been eager to regurgitate bad information or waste money on bills that should never have been written. This bill is in keeping with that tradition.

A year ago she repeated a lie that Anchorage schools had $140 million in reserves that could be spent on emergencies, making a heartfelt erroneous plea. The real number was $31 million.

She was also the proud sponsor of the dumbest bill introduced in the 2020 Legislature.

One family complained to Costello that the state refused to list the number “10” as a middle name for their child.

Outraged by this injustice, Costello, a leader in the right-size government movement, introduced a bill that would have required the state to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to reprogram its systems to recognize numerals as names.

The bill received a single hearing, which was one too many.

Costello should have withdrawn the bill and compensated the state for thousands of dollars of wasted staff time. She even forced legislative lawyers to write two memos on the topic.

In the second memo, a legislative lawyer wrote that Costello had asked “that the REAL ID federal act be amended to require the use of numeric characters that are in the applicant’s legal name.”

But Costello must have been asleep in high school when the structure of the U.S. government was taught.

“The state Legislature has no authority over federal law requirements,” the lawyer told her.

This year, the smart move for Costello is to withdraw the bill for the $1,000 fines.

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