Open Government. Virginia Beach-Style.

Well, so much for transparency.

Remember all the happy talk about open government? The way the air felt clearer, the future seemed brighter - less soiled by cronyism anyway - just last fall?

You know, right after the elections?

We had a new mayor, after a temporary guy and one who was convicted of conflict of interest. We had new council members. 

The doors to the city would open wide now, we were told. No more back room deals. No more favoritism. No more hiding from the people.

Then May 31 happened. And suddenly Virginia Beach went dark.

Since that tragedy, city officials have been miserly in sharing information. Instead of holding regular press conferences to keep the public informed of developments, they’ve shut down. In fact, false information has been shared and not corrected.

It’s time for city officials to tell us what they know about who was shot and why they were targeted by the killer.

City Council - content to wait up to a year for answers - had to be goaded by victims’ families into agreeing to an independent investigation of what happened on that awful day. 

Sixteen of our friends and neighbors were shot. Twelve of them died. People who weren’t physically injured, who were simply doing their jobs that day, are suffering from PTSD as they try to unsee all they saw on that cursed Friday afternoon.

“We were people who answered the phone, ‘Public utilities, how can I help you,” one survivor told me last week.

The next thing they knew, bullets were flying, their colleagues were dead and dying and the workplace looked like a battlefield.

“We weren’t prepared for this,” I was told. 

“Anyone who was on the second or third floor of Building 2 between 4 and 5 on May 31st saw awful things,” the survivor said, with a shaking voice.

I can’t imagine.

This survivor was one of the workers who attended a meeting that began at 6 p.m. on July 10th with the city manager and others to discuss what they’d experienced since the massacre. There was talk about needing time away from the workplace. About using up personal leave for mental health, something that should be covered by workers’ comp.

The Virginian-Pilot reports that along with several city officials, five city council members attended.

Making this an illegal meeting.

Virginia law is crystal clear. There is no ambiguity. No exceptions for terrible tragedies. 

Any time more than two members of city council attend a meeting, it’s a public meeting. The public must be given adequate notice so they can attend.

Present at last week’s meeting, according to the Pilot, were council members Sabrina Wooten, Barbara Henley, Rosemary Wilson, Michael Berlucchi and Mayor Bobby Dyer.

They should have known better. Three of those members - Henley, Wilson and Dyer - have a combined 74 years on city council.

They can’t possibly say they were unfamiliar with Virginia’s open meeting laws.

Remedies were available: Three of the members could have quickly departed. 

They didn’t.

The meeting could have been postponed.

It wasn’t.

Instead, elected officials went ahead and deliberately broke state law.

This is beginning to feel a lot like the bad old days. Before the last election.