A little daylight, please

Thanks to a tip from a Henderson resident, Times reporter Sarah Haase on Monday discovered that the state comptroller's office was about to force the new Henderson Town Council into an illegal executive session. With some digging, the Times found out that the comptroller's Bureau of Audit and Control does this regularly, all across the state.

An auditor from the state agency was to meet with the council in executive session to go over the recently completed audit of town finances. However, such a topic is not even remotely close to any of the permitted reasons for a closed meeting that are delineated under the section of Public Officers Law known as the open meetings law. The topic of discussion of such meetings is a financial review of town practices, essentially a critique of how a municipality collects, budgets and spends taxpayer money. If any subject should be open to public view, it is that.

It is true that sometimes, audits find fault with the actions of individuals. However, that fault is found in the performance of their public jobs and does not deal with the areas of personnel that are protected by law. Here is what the law allows government bodies to discuss under that topic:

Section 105 1-f. the medical, financial, credit or employment history of a particular person or corporation, or matters leading to the appointment, employment, promotion, demotion, discipline, suspension, dismissal or removal of a particular person or corporation;

The comptroller's office is charged with protecting state taxpayers and with being a watchdog, if you will, of government action. Yet, according to Robert Freeman, executive director of the Committee on Open Government, state auditors not only encourage municipalities to violate state law, they virtually compel it. Auditors who are rebuffed when they request that a meeting be closed pack up their adding machines and leave without discussing their business.

The Henderson meeting didn't happen, according to town officials, because the efforts of the Times to cover the meeting made the auditor take the matter to a higher level for discussion. Now it's time for those at the higher level to do the right thing.

It's long past time for the comptroller to put an end to this nonsense. An audit is designed to expose municipal financial practices to the light of day. That can't very well be done under the cloak of night.