Needed for city: a healthy dose of transparency

May 3—That it has taken the Beckley City Council this long to initiate serious discussions about a lease for Fruits of Labor nearly two years after inviting the business to operate out of a city-owned, downtown building speaks not just to the mismanagement of the whole affair by city officials, including the mayor, city attorney, city treasurer and city council, but also to a larger problem — a genuine and willful lack of transparency.

Open and honest conversations with the public should always be paramount, a signature trait of governmental bodies whose members are elected or appointed to do the work of the people. Their first instinct, in fact, should be to share whatever information comes before them with the public. Given the many avenues to do just that officially in the digital age, it should be easy to arrange. But to this crew, open government is a foreign concept and the city's dismissive attitude toward sharing information with the public is arrogant at best. Arguably, how some decisions are bing made would be considered illegal by most any reading of the state's open meeting laws.

No one needs reminding how Mayor Rob Rappold prefers private discussions of public matters. Back in Jan. 2018, weeks after Gov. Jim Justice had closed 90-year-old Black Knight because it was unprofitable, The Register-Herald broke the news that the city had negotiated a deal to buy the property for $3 million. The mayor was quoted as saying that he had "the green light from six members of council" to move forward with the transaction — all before a single public airing of the proposed deal had been held.

Yes, all of those green lights were, in essence, the mayor seeking to circumvent public opinion, avoid conflict and move forward as quickly as possible. The less said the better, apparently. That has been and remains this mayor's modus operandi, and, as we have all witnessed, it is troubling.

Earlier this year, after fumbling and bumbling for the better part of the last half year with a decision and process to change the form of city governance, the council — as proposed by the mayor — voted for a change from strong mayor governance to hiring a city manager. Instead of hosting and encouraging a healthy give-and-take on the issue, instead of letting people of the city go to the polls and have their say, instead of listening to citizens speaking up in various forums, the council moved ahead. And that was the end of the story until it wasn't. Now, the issue is being debated in a Raleigh County courtroom where the city is being sued over its interpretation of Beckley's charter.

Most recently, following a work session on preparing a lease for Fruits of Labor, the mayor directed council members to email city attorney Bill File their preferences on that long-overdue lease — in private, of course. Not for public consumption.

Who on city council told the mayor no, that writing leases and laws and ordinances out of public view is not the proper manner to have this discussion? Who in city administration had the temerity to tell their old friend that, Mayor Rappold, piecing together a lease via secretive email runs contrary to how the law says we should be conducting the people's business? Who is standing up for the voice of the people when the people are purposefully excluded?

This newspaper has been broadly supportive of Mayor Rappold's agenda — of adding Black Knight to the city's portfolio of parks and recreation offerings and of providing space downtown for both Fruits of Labor and Seed Sower to attend to the recovery of those who are battling substance use disorder. We also believe the city will be better off for having a city manager running the show.

Each of those issues can be and should be debated on their own merits — in open meetings where the public had the opportunity to weigh in.

For now, we encourage the mayor, council members and the city's top administrators to start behaving like public servants and act in the public's interest, to be forthcoming in all matters of public interest. And we will tell those seeking public office in this month's municipal election that we expect nothing less of them and that we will hold them accountable.

In short, the city's business needs to be conducted in broad daylight and elected officials should behave as servants to the people. It's just that simple.