St. Louis County Executive Sam Page and members of the County Council apparently found it too inconvenient to debate the budgeting process in full public view. Last week, they decided to start holding multiple closed-door sessions of Page and three council members — one short of a quorum — as a way of skirting Sunshine Law open-meeting requirements. Whenever lawmakers deliberately try to skirt open meetings laws, they should find themselves on the losing end of a lawsuit.

As the Post-Dispatch’s Kelsey Landis reported, Page planned to meet behind closed doors with three County Council members in weekly “working sessions” to negotiate solutions to the county’s $41 million budget hole. Although the meetings were for working out ways to spend taxpayer money, taxpayers would be excluded from the talks. Instead, Page said he would provide a monthly public synopsis. This idea is unacceptable on so many fronts that officials deserve to be dragged into court by the state attorney general’s office as part of his duty to uphold the Sunshine Law.

The motive for meeting behind closed doors is obvious: The county’s budget hole is severe, and controversial spending cuts are a certainty. If those discussions are held in public, people might get upset and speak out. As newly seated Republican council member Dennis Hancock put it, council members need to be able to speak freely — apparently without all of that messy and disruptive public input.

“If it becomes a large meeting, it tends to get bogged down in grandstanding,” Hancock said.

Perhaps the law, as well as the observation thereof, is too tedious for Page and council members. So they might find the Sunshine Law explanation on the state attorney general’s website to be an important time- and litigation-saver.

It says: “Meetings of public governmental bodies, where a quorum is present, and public business is discussed, are subject to the Sunshine Law. This includes telephone conferences and internet chat sessions, as well as meetings, or a series of meetings, each involving fewer than a quorum of the members, but collectively involving a quorum of the public body, where the body’s members deliberately attempt to discuss public business while evading the Sunshine Law.”

Members of elective bodies who want to evade open-meetings laws very typically try to get around requirements by organizing what’s called a “walking quorum.” They meet in small groups or talk on the phone, reach an agreement, and then each of those members holds closed-door meetings with other members until a large-enough consensus has been organized to avoid an unwanted public debate. When a public vote finally comes, the decision has been made in advance on how members will vote.

The council tried this ploy before, during the pandemic, and it failed miserably. They should have known better than to try it again. Let taxpayers see how the sausage is made because, after all, they’re paying for the sausage.