90.5 WESA: “The body responsible for overseeing the Allegheny County Jail has increasingly delegated discussions about health care, staffing, and the welfare of incarcerated people to closed-door committee meetings. The practice has sparked concerns that the arrangement may run afoul of state transparency laws.

Members of the county’s nine-person Jail Oversight Board have routinely met in smaller subcommittees without notifying the public, only later sharing high-level summaries of the discussions. That’s despite the Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Act, which mandates transparency from government boards and generally requires members to deliberate and make decisions in public.

‘The law requires government to be open to the public it serves,’ said Melissa Melewsky, in-house counsel with the Pennsylvania News Media Association. ‘It is designed so that most discussions of agency, business, and all official action takes place at a public meeting, and there are very limited exceptions to that general rule.’…

‘When you look at how other branches of local government work — other committees, other councils — they hold their meetings in public,’ said Tanisha Long, a community organizer with the Abolitionist Law Center. County Council itself, for example, holds its committee meetings in public.

But at the Jail Oversight Board, decisions made in committee often become official with little discussion.”

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