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WATERBURY TEACHERS ASSN. v. FREEDOM OF INFO. COMM.5/13/1997
The Freedom of Information Act, which requires the meetings of a public agency to be open to the public; General Statutes § 1-21; defines the term "meeting" to exclude "strategy or negotiations with respect to collective bargaining." General Statutes § 1-18a (b). The sole issue in these certified administrative appeals is whether grievance proceedings between a teachers union and a public school board come, in whole or in part, within the legislative exclusion for "strategy or negotiations."
This action arises from the consolidation of two appeals, the procedural history and factual underpinnings of which are undisputed. On April 29, 1992, and on May 6, 1992, the committee on grievances of the defendant Waterbury board of education (board) conducted grievance hearings at the initiation of the plaintiff, the Waterbury Teachers Association (union). The union had brought these grievances against the board on behalf of certain members as a result of alleged violations of the collective bargaining agreement in place between the board and the union. Although, pursuant
to § 1-18a (a), the board is concededly a public agency, the board and the union agreed not to hold the grievance hearings in public. The complainants, Marc S. Ryan and James B. Craig (individual complainants), an editorial writer and reporter, respectively, and their newspaper, the defendant Waterbury Republican-American (newspaper), filed with the defendant freedom of information commission (commission), a complaint challenging the absence of public notice of, and public access to, these grievance hearings.
After a contested hearing, the commission concluded that the grievance sessions held by the committee on grievances should have been conducted in accordance with the terms of § 1-21 and ordered the board and the union to comply with the statute in the future. The commission came to the same conclusion with respect to a second complaint, also filed by the individual complainants and the newspaper, concerning another closed grievance hearing that had been held on December 15, 1993.
Pursuant to General Statutes §§ 1-21i and 4-183 (a), the union appealed the validity of these orders to the
trial court. After consolidating these separate actions, the court sustained the union's appeals, concluding that grievance proceedings were "part of the ongoing collective bargaining process." The individual complainants, the newspaper and the commission then appealed to the Appellate Court, which, after determining that "grievance hearings constituted negotiations," affirmed the judgments of the trial court. Waterbury Teachers Assn. v. Freedom of Information Commission, 42 Conn. App. 700, 709, 682 A.2d 125 (1996). We granted, in identical terms, the two petitions for certification to appeal filed, respectively, by the individual complainants and the newspaper, and by the commission. We reverse the judgments of the Appellate Court.
In analyzing the scope of the statutory exclusion for "strategy or negotiations with respect to collective bargaining" contained in § 1-18a (b), we do not write on a clean slate. In Glastonbury Education Assn. v. Freedom of Information Commission, 234 Conn. 704, 711-13, 663 A.2d 349 (1995), we recently construed this subsection to exclude from the term "meeting" only those parts of collective bargaining sessions that relate specifically to "strategy or negotiations," rather than to collective bargaining proceedings in their entirety. We
arrived at this construction in light of the long-standing legislative policy of the Freedom of Information Act favoring "the open conduct of government and free public access to government records.
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