Matt Ready

• March 2014 – Hospital Commissioner Matt Ready (me) begins recording a public meeting.  He is pressured to turn it off.  He does.
• March 27, 2014 – email from jhc board chair Marie Dressler:  “Matt…. should you choose to personally contact and seek advice from the District’s counsel, I want to make it crystal clear that any such consultation(s) will be solely and totally at your own expense.” 
• June 2016 – Hospital Commissioner Matt Ready (me) begins recording a public meeting.  He is ordered to turn it off.  He is told he is doing wrong by recording.  He refuses to turn off the recorder until the meeting is concluded.
• June 2019 – Hospital Commissioner Matt Ready directs transcripts from two above incidents to consultant Karma, frequent paid contractor for the Association of Public Hospital Districts and the Washington State Hospital Association.  Karma is scheduled to facilitate a Jefferson Healthcare all day public meeting in October 2019.  Karma promises to review the transcripts to be ready to address any issues related to recording at the October 2019 meeting.
• June 2019 – I learn several employees of the the Association of Public Hospital Districts and the Washington State Hospital Association have taken an interest in the book I published with the transcripts of the two above incidents.  They promise to read it.  I have never heard any comment on the issues back.  AWPHD and WSHA have remained totally silent.
• October 2019 – Jefferson Healthcare board members and Karma all fail to acknowledge the right to record and the wrong doing of pressuring someone to turn off their recorder.
• November 2019 – MRSC (Municipal Research and Services Center) contacted by Matt Ready (me) but they refuse to offer an opinion on the matter beyond acknowledging the basic right to record a meeting.  MRSC is funded by the Association of Washington Public Hospital Districts.  The Association of Washington Public Hospital Districts does not allow elected hospital commissioners to serve on its board.
• December 11, 2019 – Matt Ready (me) publishes my evaluation of the board and CEO calling out the fact that the Jefferson Healthcare board has been denied equal and adequate access to legal council for 6 years in regards to the right of a commissioner to record a public meeting without harassment.
• December 2019 meeting – For the first time ever, a lawyer paid by Jefferson Healthcare agrees to research and give an opinion to the full Jefferson Healthcare board to answer the question:  “Can a public hospital commissioner record a meeting over the objection of the rest of the board?”.  Please note, at the 2014 meeting, it was claimed that a lawyer gave the hospital all sorts of legal advice and guidance on this matter- but NONE of that was ever written down and given to the board in a legitimate format.  It has literally taken 5 years for the board to get a lawyer to agree to give clear specific guidance on this matter.

So soon, we will all have an actual lawyer attempt to express an actual legal opinion (one they will need to be ready to stand behind under scrutiny) as to whether or not the hospital can legally force a commissioner to turn off a personal recording device.

The funny thing is, the hospital might actually have that legal power.  I don’t think it does, but you might be able to find a judge somewhere to rule that way.  Ironically, the answer is irrelevant, because even if they do have the power, the question is not “can you force someone to stop recording?”, the question is “should you stop someone from recording?”  Even if you have the power to do something as vile as forcing a person in a supposedly free and democratic country from turning off a personal recording device during an open public meeting, why would you ever think of doing something so obviously wrong?

Anyways, now that an actual lawyer is involved, we might finally have some sort of resolution to this issue in sight.  Too bad the people working at MRSC, AWPHD, WSHA, and all local news media (two newspapers and one radio station) in my area all failed to do anything to help highlight or resolve this 5 year dispute.  I don’t think it needed to take this long.  This was not that complex an issue.

Maybe next time.  I’m sure you were all doing something to earn your paychecks over the last 5 years to help support fair and free functioning of our public institutions, specifically public hospital districts.