Taxpayers, water users being kept in dark

The public's right to open government is fundamental to a functioning democracy, so much so that only under certain circumstances -- national security, for example-should that right be abridged. Occasionally, however, the people's right to be informed runs a distant second to making the wheels of justice run smoothly.

And that, we think, is wrong.

In March 2000, seven area municipalities -- Annona, Avery, DeKalb, Hooks, Maud, New Boston and Wake Village -- filed a lawsuit against Texarkana Water Utilities in Bowie County District Court, alleging TWU had overcharged them for water. Bowie County judges recused themselves from hearing the lawsuit, so it was moved to the state's 76th District Court at Mount Pleasant, where Judge Jim White presides.

One of White's first rulings was to slap a gag order on all the parties involved, prohibiting them from discussing any aspect of the case. White's reasoning centers around his belief that potential jurors would be tainted by media accounts of the lawsuit and the gag order is one way of ensuring that information that could sway their beliefs is kept under wraps.

White's move is not the first of its kind. Judges who fear pretrial publicity will contaminate a potential jury pool often restrict the type of information that can be made public from a criminal or civil case. But it is unusual when the business being gagged is public business, citizens' business, homeowners' business, utility users' business, taxpayers' business or any combination of the above. Then it seems unwarranted.

More troubling is a publicized comment White made, the essence of which is that White thinks it more important to protect the jury pool than to allow the people who would be affected by this lawsuit to be informed about what's going on.

We couldn't disagree more. The result of White's gag order, whether intended or accidental, is a damper on information regarding the lawsuit or, for that matter, most official public discourse on the newly approved Lake Wright Patman Water Supply Agency, which 11 Bowie and Red River county cities approved last week. The 11 city councils that voted to join this water supply alliance told their citizens very little about the meaning or their motives in making this move-a disservice to the people they were elected to represent.

No doubt the lawsuit by these cities against TWU will have considerable impact on the people involved, and so, too, will the creation and formation of the new water supply agency. For that reason, the people who will be directly affected by these decisions deserve to know more than they were allowed to hear.

Government always works better when it operates under the sunshine of public scrutiny. In regard to the lawsuit and the move to create the water agency, the work was done in the shadows of judicial tactics that, while sometimes appropriate, in this case left the public in the dark on very important issues.