Imagine you're driving past your kid's school and you notice some construction you hadn't seen before.

Dump trucks and construction cranes and burly guys wearing helmets, and traffic cones and red steel beams lying on the lawn, the whole works.

Out front, a big sign with a painting of a building on it says, "Site of our new $6 million administrative center."

You pull over and ask what's going on, and the construction manager says, "Didn't ya hear? The school board approved it last month."

If you're a taxpayer in that district, and the school board went ahead and approved a multi-million-dollar project in secret without providing you with any details until the construction was already under way, you'd go out of your mind. And you'd be justified.

But that's exactly what school districts do to taxpayers when they approve contracts behind closed doors without providing any justification, any breakdown of the cost impact or any opportunity for the public to comment until after the final decision has been made. Since personnel costs are by far the largest portion of any school budget, making up about 70 to 80 percent of an entire school budget, the expense to taxpayers can easily be millions of dollars a year.

It was June when the Fort Edward school district and its teachers union agreed on a new contract. It was July when the board and the union ratified the deal without having released details to the public. And even though The Post-Star filed Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests for a copy of the contract months ago, we have yet to receive it, five full months after the board approved it. That's a flagrant violation of the Freedom of Information Law and a slap in the face to their taxpaying public.

Unfortunately for taxpayers all around the area and state, this is not an unusual situation. Millions of dollars of tax money is being spent in secret all over the state without any opportunity for citizens to influence the decision.

The Empire Center for New York State Policy, an Albany-based public advocacy organization, issued a report earlier this week citing numerous examples around the state, including the Fort Edward case, of taxpayer abuse in the name of contract secrecy. While school districts are often guilty of the practice, it's not limited to them. (See box.)

The state Open Meetings Law does allow boards and unions to negotiate terms of their deals in secret, the justification being that they don't want to reveal each other's negotiating positions. That's a legitimate justification for secrecy and one that the public and the media readily accept.

The problem comes when they still keep the contract secret after both sides are done negotiating and there is no longer that justification for secrecy. At that point, the only reason for a board to keep the information secret is to avoid backlash from the citizens who have to pay the tab. And fear of public retribution is not a legal justification for defying the Opening Meetings Law under any circumstances.

If the public rebels against a contract and the two sides are forced to go back and renegotiate, so be it. That's the price they pay for being on the public's payroll.

Fort Edward officials say they honored the public's right to know by releasing a list of the changes they made to the old contract. But that would be like sending the IRS a shoebox full of receipts and claiming you filed your taxes. Sure, all the information might be there. But the IRS shouldn't have to sort it all out for you (and they won't). Same thing with taxpayers. Give them a document, not some shoebox full of changes that they have to then cut and paste into the old contract in order to make sense of it.

As a result of the many flagrant violations of the public's right to know, the Empire Center is pushing for changes to the Open Meetings Law that would require government bodies, including school districts, to release tentative contract agreements prior to ratification.

But the center goes even further, seeking a breakdown of the long-term cost of any contract, a breakdown of savings attributed to union "givebacks" and a list of proposed salary increases on an annualized and cumulative percentage basis.

Employment contracts are the biggest line item in any government budget. Taxpayers have a right to see them before their government boards approve them.

(Derek Pruitt File Photo)

We fully support any amendments to the Open Meetings Law that will make our government more transparent and more accessible to the people.

Local editorials represent the opinion of the Post-Star editorial board, which consists of Publisher Rick Emanuel, Editor Ken Tingley, Editorial Page Editor Mark Mahoney and citizen representative Robin Temple.