Victor Ashe of Knoxville has been named as TCOG's representative on the Advisory Committee on Open Government along with four other new members.
The Joint Government Operations Committee held a public hearing today on the Douglas Henry State Museum Commission's new restrictive speech policy for its commissioners. Below are comments I delivered as TCOG's executive director outlining why the policy is at odds with open government, the Tennessee Constitution and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. My comments were part of the public comments part of the hearing, which followed about an hour of questions from members of the joint committee, led by its two chairmen state Sen. Mike Bell and state Rep. Jeremy Faison. Almost all of the lawmakers expressed deep concern about the commission's new policy and how it came about. [...]
The Douglas Henry State Museum Commission adopted a new code of conduct on Monday that requires all commission members except for the chair and vice-chair to provide advance notification to the entire commission of any comments that they make to the public before making them. The policy would cover any communication with the press, or any public comments or written comments. The commission also decided it would apply to social media. "Should a Commissioner, excluding the Chair and Vice-Chair, publish any written statement, including blogs, or give any public statement regarding the Commission, Museum, Executive Director, or Museum personnel the Commissioner shall provide the Commission with an advance copy of [...]
The News Sentinel published an editorial today saying that the "Douglas Henry State Museum Commission is barreling toward a possible violation of the state's Open Meetings Act." It urges the commission, which was just allocated $120 million of taxpayer money toward construction of the new facility, to open to the public its planned March 28 meeting in which it is scheduled to discuss what is needed in replacing the museum's long-time executive director. One of the commission members, Victor Ashe, called for the state museum meeting to be open, but has met resistance from another member, Tom Smith, who heads a committee on succession planning. (Ashe is a member of TCOG's board [...]
Tom Humphrey with the Knoxville News Sentinel reports that Victor Ashe, a former lawmaker and former Knoxville mayor, has clashed with the state museum board on which he sits over a plan to close a meeting to discuss selection of a new museum director. An excerpt from the story: The board governing the Tennessee State Museum, officially known as the Douglas Henry State Museum Commission, has scheduled an eight-hour "workshop" for March 28 to discuss the selection of a new museum executive director to succeed Lois Riggins-Ezzell at some point. In an exchange of email with Tom Smith of Nashville, who chairs a museum board committee on "succession planning" that [...]
