Forty-two elected officials,lobbyists, business executives and educators, including Gov. Scott McCallum, met secretly in northern Wisconsin to discuss state funding of public schools.
Why the seclusion? Morris Andrews, a former teachers union head who's getting $5,700 per month from the state to study school finance, said a public meeting "will stymie open discussion and will lead to nothing happening on behalf of the children of this state."
Judging by what has dribbled ot of the meeting, Andrews couldn't be more wrong. It seems that 42 people met privately to discuss nonsense. McCallum emerged from the meeting condemning state imposed salary restraints on teachers, but this is the same governor who bemoans high taxes and opposes a tax increase to meet a budget deficit that is already past $1 billion. Math, it seems, wasn't on the agenda.
The meeting was an insult to Wisconsin taxpayers and the state's heritage of open government. Why couldn't participants, to borrow another Andrews quote, "express their opinions in a candid fashion"? Does Andrews imply that lawmakers and lobbyists don't express candid opinions in public? If so, it means that all those campaign commercials that will flood the airwaves next fall are nothing more than slick, expensive disinformation.
Call us naive if you like, but we believe the things lawmakers say in private should be no different than what they say in public. Lawmakers who need secrecy to express their real opinions are hiding something from the public, and that's wrong. How sad that the state's most powerful people can talk candidly to each other but not to the citizens of Wisconsin.