Kline accused of violating spirit of open-meetings law / LJWorld.com

Archive for Thursday, February 10, 2005

J-W Staff and Wire Reports

February 10, 2005

Topeka — Kansas Atty. Gen. Phill Kline was accused Wednesday of skirting the state's open-meetings law after meeting privately with conservative members of the Kansas State Board of Education. Kline said he did nothing wrong.

The law requires meetings of six or more education board members -- a quorum on the 10-member board -- take place in public.

Tuesday, Kline had two meetings with three members each of the education board. The four moderate board members were not invited.

Moderate board member Sue Gamble said the meetings violated the spirit of the law.

Kline said he met with the conservative board members to discuss the school finance litigation and to mention that he would help them if they wanted to put stickers on science textbooks that said evolution was theory and not a fact.

On school finance, he said he advised board members to be careful how they phrase things because it could be used against the state. For example, he said, a recent board brochure says the state has set a standard of having 100 percent of students become proficient in a subject. A court could later claim the state wasn't accomplishing its goal if 99 percent of the students weren't proficient, he said.

Asked why moderate board members shouldn't receive this legal advice, Kline said he believed there were legislators with better relationships with those board members who were conveying that message.

He also said the meetings didn't violate the meetings law because he met with only three members at a time and was not conveying the opinions of board members from meeting to meeting.

Mike Merriam, a Topeka media attorney, said the subject of the meeting related to business of the board and should have been open.

"He wasn't calling them to invite them to a birthday party," Merriam said.

Merriam said it was unclear whether the meetings violated state law, but they "at least skirted it."

He said Kline has promoted openness in government and "should be serious about it when it involves his own actions."

Doug Anstaett, executive director of the Kansas Press Assn., said he believed the meetings violated the open-meetings law.

"While I want to be fair and give Attorney General Kline the benefit of the doubt on this, had I been called by a member of my association and asked if meetings similar to these were a violation of KOMA (Kansas Open Meetings Act), I would have said 'yes.' He could have conveyed his message to the board in a public meeting," Anstaett said.