Mayor Lyn Hall's instincts were right. A few months late, but right nevertheless.
On Oct. 9, he sent an email to city manager Kathleen Soltis, director of external relations Rob van Adrichem and communciations officer Michael Kellet.
He wrote: "Hi folks, is there any interest in placing City of PG signs at locations like RiverBend, Marriott as an example to indicate the City supported the project thru zoning etc. It was mentioned some time ago in a conversation."
He got a reply from Soltis just nine minutes later.
"Hi, Lyn. I don't think we should put signs up for supporting zoning, etc.," she wrote.
"If we put signs up it should be because we're contributing developer incentives like RTEs or $s per door, etc. Doing so may be well received by some members of the public and not so well by others."
Wrong answer.
For starters, both RiverBend and Marriott did receive developer incentives from the city. In the case of the Marriott, The Citizen has reported that the city has hit a roadblock with Northern Development Initiative Trust by trying to offer both tax breaks and an interest-free loan to the hotel project.
Under an agreement between the trust and the city, it's one or the other, not both.
The city, however, continues to this day to lobby NDIT, an arms-length regional economic development agency, to revise its policy to suit.
The final part of Soltis's email should have set alarm bells off for Hall.
The natural answer for a career bureaucrat is to withhold information. That doesn't mean that Soltis or any other bureaucrats reluctant to broadcast details to the public are up to no good.
It simply means that there is wisdom in the old phrase that people don't always need to know how the sausage is made if it tastes good and fills the belly.
Hall is well aware, however, from his days as a school board trustee and board chair during painful rounds of school closures, that providing as much information as possible to the public in an open and transparent way is short-term pain for long-term gain. People may not agree with the final decision but including them in the discussion makes them feel their concerns were heard and they were part of the process.
Although experts are divided on the merits of governments offering tax breaks and other incentives to spark private development, there is nothing inherently wrong with the practice.
The City of Prince George's business incentive programs were well reported when they were adopted during public city council meetings.
What has not been disclosed to the public is who has been receiving these incentives and how much they have received.
In the case of the Marriott, Hall should have announced at the public event in July marking the Marriott's involvement and the restart of the project that the city was supporting the project with more than best wishes. For the people who wanted city council to do something about that embarrassing mess, greasing the wheels with development incentives is well worth the investment. Of course people (and newspaper editors) will criticize, whether it's because they feel government shouldn't be in the business of propping up private developers or because they question the legitimacy of the project or the size of the investment.
Bearing the brunt of that criticism is a cross neither Soltis nor city staff have to bear.
That responsibility lies with the mayor and his eight council colleagues. If they believe they have made the right decision, they can defend it to anyone they meet who says otherwise.
That's their job.
It's also part of their job to resist the urges of the bureaucracy to keep city business out of the public eye. Since there was no legal reason to not tell local residents about the city's financial support of the Marriott, the mayor and council should have announced it with the same degree of pride they take in all of their decisions for the good of the community.
Sadly, the bureaucracy continues to resist such efforts.
During an email exchange with city officials Thursday, they were asked the following: "Councillors have referenced a closed door meeting and a private vote on this project. Why couldn't that be done at a public meeting?"
The reply: "There wasn't a closing meeting of council during which a vote was taken on the Marriott project."
In other words, the question was ignored and the existence of a closed meeting was denied.
The problem is that Coun. Garth Frizzell has said in an interview there was such a meeting but he said he couldn't make the results of the vote public because it was a closed session.
When that was put to the city, this was the written reply: "Our response remains the same: there was no closed meeting of council during which a vote was taken on the Marriott project."
Of course, there was a meeting but the bureaucracy can deny such a meeting ever happened if there were no official minutes taken or if it wasn't called a closed meeting but an in-camera meeting.
Such are the games some bureaucrats feel they need to play.
Frizzell and Hall know what's right.
Voters always appreciate honesty and transparency, even when they disagree with the decisions. The wisdom of city council's significant support of the Marriott project can be argued but there's no debate necessary when it comes to conducting the public's business in public.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
