On February 14, 2025, we broke a story about an alleged secretive meeting on January 26, 2025 regarding the tax proposal to fund the Port litigation. This meeting came on the heels of a vague announcement of an “off agenda” item at the January 16, 2025 meeting.
Councilman Moran, to his credit, responded on Facebook to the allegation. Let’s take a look a Councilman Moran’s response.
Before breaking down Mr. Moran’s response, we do want to take a moment to commend Moran for engaging with the public as this is certainly not an easy thing to do on topics that are as unpopular as this tax proposal. But we have to be honest, Moran’s response did little to reassure the public that there was not something underhanded going on with this tax proposal.
Moran tried to downplay the secretive January 26, 2025 meeting as only “an informational meeting” as if the public has no interest in simply obtaining information about this tax proposal. It seems fairly obvious that one of the reasons that such meetings are intended to be public is so that the public can obtain information on what their government is doing. The sheer volume and intensity of the comments to the comments on the S.O.S. Facebook Forum to the Moran’s initial response should be an indicator of how anxious the public was to simply get information, not a political spin, about the tax proposal. The public would have been able to get that information if the January 26, 2025 meeting would have been made known and accessible to the public.
Moran also tried to downplay the secretive aspect of the meeting by saying that “[a] copy of the transcript is available to the public for anyone who wants to review exactly what was discussed.” Neither the agenda nor the minutes of the meeting were posted on the official Agenda Center. So how would the public know to ask for a copy of the transcript of a meeting that they didn’t know happened? Moran, who prides himself on “transparency” apparently doesn’t understand the concept of transparency.
Contrast Moran’s understanding with that of Councilman Everhardt has provided us with the documents to bring many of these issues to your attention. This is not about picking favorites or taking sides in a political battle – claiming that is just a way to avoid taking responsibility. But we have to admit that most of our elected officials merely pay lip service to transparency while operating almost exclusively behind the scenes. But real transparency is crucial because real transparency is the basis for real accountability.
We do not want to be too hard on Moran. We again commend him for engaging with the public. And let’s be real – there were other elected officials present at the January 26, 2025 meeting that are equally responsible for not being transparent with the public who have still yet to respond to this controversy.
Our elected officials owe a more direct answer to the public about this secretive meeting. At a minimum, the President and Council should answer the following questions:
- What was the reason that this meeting was not made known to the public?
- Why was this meeting not published on the official Agenda Center?
- Who made the decision to not publish notice of the January 26, 2025?
- Why was this meeting not televised as all of the other Council meetings?
- Who made the decision not to televise the January 26, 2025 meeting?
We will gladly publish the response to these questions of the President and any Councilmember. Any elected official taking us up on that offer can reach us send us an e-mail at tdurden@somethingstinks.org.
