Access Showdown at City Hall

The press crashed what Mayor Nutter intended to be a private budget briefing for City Council yesterday. The fullest accounts of the incident can be found here and here, while the Inquirer report dealt principally with the substance of the meeting. Reporters, who tend for obvious reasons to take an expansive view of state open meetings law, felt that the session (which included well over a quorum of council members) constituted a public meeting under the act. Nutter's administration takes the view that it is free to hold closed informational sessions with council, so long as no work is done on legislation. It isn't a new disagreement. Governments and the press dispute the scope of the law all the time. In December, for instance, City Council held what amounted to an illegal closed meeting to hammer out an agreement on minority inclusion for the Convention Center expansion project.

What was new was the tenor of the confrontation between the press and the Nutter administration. It wasn't a friendly disagreement. At one point Councilman Frank Rizzo cracked, "the honeymoon is over."

Nutter administration officials are plainly angry about the incident. They say that the administration has so far been remarkably open and transparent, and that is absolutely true. Reporters' questions are answered promptly. Facts and figures that in past administration were difficult to obtain without filing an official and time consuming right to know request are now handed over with little to no fuss. And Nutter and his senior staff remain remarkably accessible to the press.

But given his campaign commitments to transparency and open government, Nutter is being held to a higher standard. The press isn't alone on this either. It's clear that at least a few council members also felt the meeting should have been open. How else would reporters have known there was a meeting to crash?

Bonus open meetings law reading.