Tony Doris: West Palm Beach in the Sunshine

Tony Doris at the West Palm Beat has a follow-up on West Palm Beach's Sunshine Law training that was originally held in the dark. The quote by Barbara Petersen below pretty much sums it up. Here are two excerpts:

     West Palm Beach held a second Sunshine Law training session Wednesday for city officials and advisory board members.
     This time it was an open meeting.
     Pat Gleason, special counsel for open government in the Florida attorney general’s office, gave a brief history of the law, which she said offered broadest protections of any government in the sunshine law in the United States.

[and. . .]

     City spokesman Elliot Cohen said later that before the meeting, the administration checked with Gleason [Pat Gleason, special counsel in the Florida attorney general’s office] and was told that training sessions did not need to be held in public.
     But another of the state’s top experts in the law, Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, a Tallahassee nonprofit, said that the issue was legally a gray area.
     “But as a policy, particularly when we’re talking about sunshine, I mean, that’s the ironic thing here,” she said.

If the Sunshine Law if of interest to you, Lake Worth's City Attorney Glen Torcivia gave a very good presentation about the law: