Port Surveillance Stepped Up

We haven't been banging on our Port drum lately because others are doing a bang-up job for us; in particular the Stranger's Josh "Bloodhound" Feit and the P-I's Kristen "Pitbull" Millares Bolt -- and Capt. Tobey, to be fair. In the wake of the brouhaha over The Case of the Commission-Approved Severance That Wasn't, Feit's been Slogging furiously, not so much gloating over the scandal as refusing to let the Port or the Seattle Times* -- "Commissioners need to make some apologies and get back to the people's business" -- gloss over the matter without learning from it.

The issue with the Port is consistently a lack of accountability, which makes it hard to trust the Port's actions; Feit's coverage has focused on the Port's inappropriate use of closed executive sessions to discuss what might otherwise be termed "backroom deals."

Two weeks ago, Port Commissioner John Creighton acknowledged to me on record that the Port Commission’s executive sessions (the closed door meetings they reflexively hold before every public meeting) sometimes dealt with matters that belonged in public meetings.

Compounding this, the level of secrecy extended to not maintaining official minutes of what was discussed in the meetings (the severance-pay scandal has included a weeks-long "he-said, she-said" distraction). This at least is changing. The P-I reports that the Port is going to "review the length and frequency of its executive sessions," as well as look into some kind of oversight of which issues deserve executive sessions and which don't. Millares Bolt adds:

The port must have many such issues. Over the past year, every single regular commission meeting has opened with an hourlong executive session, and Tuesday's meeting was no exception. Once the resolution was passed, the commission recessed to executive session again.

*People sometimes complain that the Times and the P-I are copies of each other; the absurdist example is that the P-I's scoop reporter is named Kristen (Millares Bolt), while the Times has recently assigned Kirsten (Orsini-Meinhard) to the beat.