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Enron avoided public scrutiny of many of its shady business dealings by placing them out of public view in off balance sheet entities.
Now the employees of Washington taxpayers are using a similar ruse to place their activities out of public view with an entity called Association of Washington Cities.
The first item of the Association’s WEB page under WHAT DOES AWC DO? lists “Legislative representation.” In layman’s terms, this collection of taxpayer elected officials spends taxpayer money to lobby other taxpayer elected officials to give them stuff.
Of course they are embarrassed when the actual voters and taxpayers come asking pesky questions. The Association is claiming exemption from the Washington State Public Records Act.
To find out more information on this off balance sheet public entity, interested taxpayers might want to contact the president of the Association, Karen Rogers, who is also an elected Councilmember from Port Angeles, and the proprietor of Karen Rogers Consulting, a company that specializes in government affairs according to the Port Angeles WEB page.
The nationwide Open Government statutues were created precisely to keep “government affairs” from becoming private affairs.
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