Escambia commissioners can't meet in private. So why are they meeting in public less?

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Keith Bowe.

Escambia County’s Board of County Commissioners hasn’t held a Committee of the Whole meeting for over a year and has also eliminated them for 2024.

The workshops are public meetings that, according to county policy, are to be scheduled once a month to give commissioners an opportunity to discuss and, if necessary, learn more about an issue before voting on it in the regular commission meeting.

Since it violates Florida’s Government in the Sunshine Law for two or more members of the same government board to gather and discuss a matter that will come before that board for action, the meetings also serve as an opportunity for the public to understand why local leaders make the decisions that they do, especially before they vote on it.

“The agenda for Committee of the Whole meetings serves a two-fold objective,” the policy reads. “First to inform the Commissioners and their staff of matters to be brought before the Committee, to allow them to prepare themselves for intelligent discussion of the items and, secondly, to inform the public, through the courtesy of the news media, of items of interest to be taken up at the next Committee of the Whole.”

The last time Escambia County held a CoW meeting was September 2022, when former District 2 County Commissioner Doug Underhill was still on the board. Since then, each one has been cancelled and none are planned for next year.

During public forum at the board’s Nov. 2 regular meeting, Escambia County resident Keith Bowe questioned why.

“I think we could get a lot more done with Committee of the Whole where you could have conversations in the Sunshine and get some of these things worked out,” Bowe told commissioners.

The decision to hold a Committee of the Whole meeting is ultimately up to the board chairman. Over the past year District 3 Commissioner Lumon May served as chairman before recently passing the gavel to District 5 Commissioner Steven Barry, who now serves as chairman for the next year.

May defended the decision to cancel CoW meetings.

“I’m very proud of the effectiveness of procurement and the things that we’ve done and have effective government without having meetings that take away from our staff’s time of doing the work of the citizens and still getting the work of the people done,” May responded to Bowe’s comment at public forum. “So, we’re very proud of the efficiencies that we’ve brought with the elimination of the Committee of the Whole.”

Escambia County Administrator Wes Moreno says he also plays a role in cancelling CoW meetings.

“Escambia County is committed to transparency and efficiency in service to our citizens, which includes ensuring that county staff can dedicate the majority of their time to completing projects, initiatives and daily tasks that keep Escambia County moving forward,” Moreno said in a statement.

“Committee of the Whole meetings typically served as additional time for commissioners to discuss items before they were brought to a regular commission meeting for a vote, but they also required a significant amount of staff time that could have been spent on other county projects.

“Over the past year, the County Administrator and the BCC Chairman have determined that Agenda Review and Regular BCC meetings provide ample discussion time for the board to conduct county business, which led to the cancellation of the Committee of the Whole meetings. If any items come before the BCC in the future that require additional discussion beyond the regularly scheduled public meetings, the County Administrator and Chairman always have the option to schedule a special workshop if needed,” Moreno concluded.

Like neighboring leaders in Santa Rosa County still do, Escambia County previously held regular Committee of the Whole workshops for years. Even though they can’t officially vote on matters during CoW meetings, commissioners can publicly hash them out before voting during a regular board meeting.

That’s how they selected the overall design for Beulah’s OLF 8 project in February 2021, after a discussion during Committee of the Whole.

During a CoW meeting in August of 2017, Escambia County commissioners also discussed and selected contractor Whitesell-Green/Caddell to build a new county jail after the old one exploded in 2014, killing two people and injuring more than 180 others.

The county recently paid more than $3.4 million dollars to settle a lawsuit with the company over the final payment for the new facility, which included forking over an additional $2 million paid from county legal expenses coffers.

“If I only had one more thing to say, I’d say we need to have fewer court battles, we seem to be losing a lot of money,” Keith Bowe added, “but I think we could get more done with communication and maybe that’s where Committee of the Whole needs to be done.”

Why public meetings matter

According to Florida’s Sunshine Law, the primary goal of public meetings isn’t efficiency, it’s government transparency.

Barbara Petersen is executive director of the non-partisan organization Florida Center for Government Accountability, which supports investigative journalism and the state’s strong constitutional right of access to records and meetings. FLCGA’s goal is to keep government accountable to the people who elected them.

Petersen said if county leaders are only bringing up issues in meetings shortly before they vote, that begs the question of when and where they are discussing them prior to making decisions.

“It's not a matter of convenience,” said Petersen. “It would be most convenient if they didn't have to have any meetings in the Sunshine, right? We could save staff time by just letting the commissioners all get together in the conference room with the doors closed and the blinds drawn. That would be most efficient. It's not about convenience or efficiency. It's about public trust. It's about the public's ability to participate in their government. It is a participatory democracy and to say, ‘Oh, we're saving staff time,’ staff is still doing the same amount of work, aren’t they? They should be. Staff still has to do the work, they still have to do the research, but we need to understand why our commissioners are taking the actions they're taking.

“Being able to attend these meetings, you learn so much not just about whatever the subject matter is, but also the relationships between the members of the board or the commission, how they react to each other,” Petersen continued. “It's a way to learn, like with the regularly scheduled meetings where they're taking action. Sometimes that action sort of seems pro forma, like the issue is decided already, and that always raises flags. How did they come to this decision so quickly that they're all voting unanimously for the same issue? So that's the kind of thing that you see and feel in attending the meetings, and that's why public meetings are so important. Workshops are meant to inform the commissioners and give them the information they need to make an informed decision, but it also gives the public the opportunity to understand what and why that decision was made the way it was. Public meetings are critically important to the democratic process.”

Dr. Jacob Shively, associate professor for Reubin O’D. Askew Department of Government for the University of West Florida agrees open government is vital, but he also sees the need for balance.

“There are two ways to read this,” said Shively. “The cynical way is, they're just trying to get around public attention. The good faith way is, it's just difficult for them to get practical work done if they have to do everything through formal processes. The intention is good, but that it has created a lot of side effects where it creates more bureaucracy, which then can make it more difficult to get work done.”

Shively also pointed out that former Florida governor and Pensacola attorney, Reubin O’Donovan Askew, who the UWF department is named after, was a big supporter of Florida’s Sunshine Law.

Askew gave an interview about the effectiveness of it not long after it became law.

In a 1974 interview with the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Askew pointed out that if it’s just efficiency government is after, “many people say that the most efficient form of government is a dictatorial one.”

He added that transparency is key to effective leadership, and he thought even the federal government would benefit from greater open records laws.

“The problem is that politicians, it just scares them to death,” Askew said. “It is a traumatic thing to think that they have to justify their decisions publicly, but really, I have the feeling that with the exception of legitimate national defense and maybe some others that I’m not aware of, they should open up the federal government and people would feel that they have a greater part in it.”

Escambia County’s shady history with Sunshine Law

Escambia County is no stranger to Sunshine Law violations. In the past, two public officials went to jail for intentional violations of the law.

In 1999, Escambia County school board member Vanette Webb became the first public official jailed in Florida for violating the state’s open records law by refusing to provide a public record to a Pensacola mother.

A judge sentenced Webb to nearly a year in jail but suspended all but 30 days. She served a week before a different judge threw out her conviction. Although a new trial was ordered, the State Attorney’s Office decided to drop the charge because the law had been upheld and Webb had not been re-elected.

In 2001, former Florida Senate President and Escambia County commissioner W.D. Childers was found guilty of violating the Sunshine Law and of bribing fellow commissioner Willie Junior to help make $6.2 million in land deals, including the purchase of a former Pensacola soccer complex.

Childers pleaded no contest to discussing public business in private with two other suspended commissioners. He served almost three years of his 3.5 year prison sentence before he was released in 2009. A year later a federal appeals court overturned the bribery conviction.

In 2002, a jury also found Escambia County commissioner Terry Smith guilty of violating Florida’s open-government law by discussing public business in private with Childers two different times, but Smith didn’t serve any jail time.

Childers and Smith were both found guilty of making a call to then Escambia Supervisor of Elections Bonnie Smith to discuss redistricting. Only Smith was convicted over the second conversation, which allegedly was a discussion about landfill issues over lunch at Whataburger.

Two other Escambia County commissioners, Mike Bass and Willie Junior, were also suspended over Sunshine law violations and other charges involving the same corruption scandal that Childers was caught up in.

Bass and Junior both pleaded no contest to the Sunshine Law violations. In 2004, Junior disappeared days before he was to be sentenced on that and more serious charges of bribery, racketeering, extortion and grand theft. His body was later found under a friend’s house in East Hill. His death was ruled a suicide.

In 2017, Sheriff David Morgan filed a complaint with the state attorney asking for an investigation to determine if the County Commission violated the Sunshine Law when it held a closed-door "shade" meeting to discuss the sheriff's budget appeal.

In the complaint to the State Attorney's Office, the attorney for ECSO said the office was denied a public records request for the transcript from the closed portion of the meeting, which the Sheriff's Office believed violated Florida law.

The State Attorney's Office found the Escambia County Board of County Commissioners did not violate the Sunshine Law, saying they complied with all noticing requirements for the meeting and listed multiple Florida Attorney General opinions and court cases citing that governmental entities are allowed to hold attorney-client sessions. However, the sheriff's office "respectfully disagreed" with the decision.

"It should be noted that this meeting was not legally required to be in the shade. It speaks volumes as to the willingness of the BOCC to be open to the public and the Sheriff regarding the Sheriff’s budget," the ECSO said in a statement at the time.

In light of Escambia County’s past, open government advocates like Petersen say it’s important for local leaders to make every effort to create transparency.

“Escambia County is special,” said Petersen. “Escambia County is the only place where you've had two public officials go to jail for intentional violations of the Sunshine law. Secrecy fosters distrust.”

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Escambia County Committee of the Whole meetings nixed for efficiency