KPA, Capital-Journal join forces on KOMA complaint
Senate President Steve Morris, R-Hugoton, said he raised an alarm about Kansas Open Meetings Act violations at a Jan. 9 "legislative dinner" held by Gov. Sam Brownback — the first of seven such dinners this month.
Morris said he was at the governor's Cedar Crest mansion with members of the Senate KPERS Select Committee and the House Pensions and Benefits Committee. He said that Brownback advocated that the committees "do something" about KPERS and Morris quickly warned everyone present about the possibility of violating KOMA.
"I tried to intervene at that particular meeting," Morris said in his office Monday. "A couple of people tried to say stuff and I stood up and said, ‘We can't do this.’ I don't know about any of the rest of the meetings."
The KOMA prohibits a majority of a legislative body from discussing government business without giving the public notice and access.
Morris attended the Jan. 9 meeting despite being the only Republican on the KPERS Select Committee that wasn’t invited. He has drawn criticism from some conservatives for leading a moderate Senate that has acted contrary to the governor's wishes on tax and budget issues.
Morris was invited to a Jan. 23 dinner that brought together the Senate Agriculture Committee, and the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee but said he didn’t go.
The governor's office, responding to an open records request Friday, delivered a list that showed that the governor has invited a majority of 13 committees to seven dinners this month — often bringing together two or three committees with related policy missions. Sen. Kelly Kultala, D-Kansas City, was the only Democrat invited to those dinners. Kultala said Friday she believed that was a mistake, and she didn’t attend.
The governor's spokeswoman, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, said Friday that the dinners are "private" and don’t violate KOMA because they are "social gatherings."
"The Administration has been and remains in compliance with both the Kansas Open Records Act and the Kansas Open Meetings Act," Jones-Sontag said via email Monday.
But Mike Merriam, a Topeka attorney who represents the Kansas Press Association and The Topeka Capital-Journal, said the scenario Morris described sounds more like a committee hearing than a dinner party.
"Almost every legislative committee meeting is that way," Merriam said. "All they do is sit there and listen to people present stuff. Yeah, sure, that's government business."
Topeka Capital-Journal publisher Gregg Ireland said The Capital-Journal and the KPA will ask Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor to investigate the committee meetings at Cedar Crest to see if the KOMA was violated. Merriam is expected to submit the request to Taylor on Tuesday.
Merriam said it strains his imagination to suggest that the governor would invite related committees to dinner on the same night for purely social reasons, an opinion echoed by KPA executive director Doug Anstaett.
"The argument that these are ‘social gatherings’ is blown out of the water by the fact they were targeted at a majority of the members of specific committees," Anstaett said in a statement emailed Monday. "Such discussions trigger KOMA if there is not a legislative rule that exempts them. The public has a right to follow the discussion that legislators participate in to understand why this idea or that is good or bad. When these discussions are held outside a meeting room, they only serve to reinforce the public's understandable skepticism about government."
The Capital-Journal filed an open records request for the names of the committee members who attended several of the dinners but received a denial Monday from Jones-Sontag stating that the governor's office "did not locate any records of the list of guests."
The printed invitations sent out by the governor's office requested RSVPs for the dinners, either by phone or email. The Capital-Journal has another open records request pending for all email correspondence related to the dinners, as well as information on who catered them and how they were funded.
Two House Appropriations members said last week that when their committee went to Cedar Crest, the dinner discussion included tax policy — specifically, one said, constituents' concerns about the loss of deductions and credits in the governor's plan.
Rep. Doug Gatewood, D-Columbus, was one of two committee Democrats left off the guest list for that gathering. He said the last four Kansas governors have hosted random, bipartisan groups of legislators but never gathered them by committee.
Gatewood said he was always mindful of KOMA in his previous position as mayor of Columbus.
"Let's put it this way: When I was mayor I didn't have a majority of a quorum, let alone a majority of the city council, over to my house for dinner," Gatewood said. "I knew that was a violation of the open meetings act."
The invitations list provided by the governor's office also includes two future gatherings, on Feb. 6 and 7, in which random, bipartisan groups of legislators have been invited.
Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, acknowledged Monday that he received an invitation for one of those but said it was fundamentally different from the committee-specific gatherings.
"These are the same kind of gatherings Gov. (Kathleen) Sebelius had where you had just groups of legislators, both Democrat and Republican, on various committees," Hensley said. "You'll note, they're basically alphabetical."
To read a previous story about this issue, click the link below:
http://cjonline.com/news/2012-01-27/cedar-crest-meetings-may-have-violat...