This is an opinion column.

The Alabama Public Service Commission met last week to consider service fees for solar power. But the meeting had a different sort of sunshine problem.

At least three people tried to stream that meeting live on Facebook, but when the administrative law judge running the hearing, John Garner, saw them, he had those folks escorted from the meeting into the hall where a state trooper and PSC staff confiscated two of their phones until the hearing ended.

“We don’t stream live hearings here at the Commission,” Garner told the crowd. “Any live streaming needs to be shut down right now. It’s not permitted here.”

But under the Alabama Open Meetings Act — our sunshine law — citizens may record public meetings, including recording by video. This isn’t a media privilege. It’s everybody’s right as a citizen to video what our government does in its meetings.

Meetings “may be openly recorded by any person in attendance by means of a tape recorder or any other means of sonic, photographic, or video reproduction provided the recording does not disrupt the conduct of the meeting,” the law says.

The law does say public bodies may enact rules for implementing that right, but it doesn’t say they can be suspended willy-nilly.

Standing room only

Typically, the PSC, which regulates utilities in Alabama, doesn’t draw huge crowds. It’s the sort of thing you have to be going to get to, not something you’d wander into by accident.

But last week’s meeting did draw a crowd — one big enough that not everyone who showed could fit in the PSC’s auditorium.

The PSC met to hear a challenge to a fee Alabama Power charges some customers. If you have a power line only, you don’t have to pay that fee. But if you put some solar panels on top of your house, you do.

The power company has argued that it costs money to serve as a fallback when the sun doesn’t shine and it must recoup the cost keeping those customers on the grid, even if they don’t draw power from it. It charges a $5 per kilowatt fee, called a “capacity reservation charge.” For those folks with solar panels, this typically means about $20 a month out of their pockets.

That fee has irritated tree-hugging liberals and do-it-yourself libertarian types alike, and advocates for renewable energy say it discourages the wider adoption of rooftop solar systems. ­­

When the PSC met to hear the challenge to that charge last week, the room was packed to capacity. A lot of people cared about a PSC meeting enough to make the trip to Montgomery to see it in person.

But not everybody who was interested could attend, said Kari Powell, a former PSC candidate who was booted from the meeting.

“Lots of people couldn't make it,” Powell said. “And so, people that I associate with through various organizations asked if we would be live streaming it and I said yes.”

When Garner first warned the audience against streaming the meeting, Powell stopped, but after reading the Open Meetings Act on her phone she turned her feed back on. She streamed the meeting for about 10 minutes before a state trooper escorted her outside.

When Rob Burton saw Powell booted from the meeting, he turned on his phone, too. Burton is the executive director of S.W.E.E.T. Alabama, a nonprofit that promotes energy efficiency in the state.

“Obviously we're not recording from a stance of trying to cause disruption or anything along those lines,” Burton said. “We're just trying to silently sit there and be able to live stream it so people at home can watch.”

Walking on sunshine

When I reached out to Garner at the PSC for comment, he sent a written reply arguing that the PSC meeting last week was not a meeting but a hearing that’s not subject to the Open Meetings Act.

Garner also made that argument in an email to Laura Casey, one of the three people ejected for live-streaming the meeting. In that email he actually cited a section of the statute which he says exempts the PSC hearing from the Open Meetings Act. And his citation comes with a lot of curious ellipses in it.

“[T]he term ‘meeting’ under the OMA expressly does not include ‘[o]ccasions when a quorum of a governmental body…gathers…so long as the…governmental body does not deliberate specific matters that, at the time of the exchange, the participating members expect to come before the…governmental body at a later date,’” Garner wrote.

But let’s be clear what Garner’s ellipses omit — long strings of important words such as “… attends social gatherings, conventions, conferences, training programs, press conferences, media events association meetings and events or gathers for on-site inspections or meetings with applicants for economic incentives or assistance from the governmental body…”

The exemption Garner cites permits public officials to chit-chat with each other at cocktail parties and meet with economic developers, but Garner wants to use it to exclude a public hearing from the law.

And he does it with gross omissions of important qualifiers. For instance, with those ellipses he reduces “gathers for on-site inspections” into “gathers.”

But let’s be generous to Garner. Let’s just say he’s right and that the law doesn’t require him to allow live streaming of the PSC.

Even then, it doesn’t disallow it either. This was a choice, legal or not.

It was a choice to keep you from seeing and hearing the PSC’s business — the public’s business.

It was a choice Public Service Commissioners endorsed with their silence as Garner had those folks escorted from the room.

It was a choice by folks who forgot whose tax dollars pay their salaries.

“They don’t want a lot of publicity around this stuff,” Powell said. “They don’t want the public involved. They’re spooked from that.”

We’ve given so much attention lately to the evils of social media, we’ve begun to forget that it still empowers people. It gives anyone with a smartphone the ability to broadcast, and it gives anyone with a good internet connection the ability to watch and to listen.

When those phones are pointed at government, we get to see how our government works. That’s a remarkable, beautiful thing.

And the Public Service Commission is afraid of that. They’re afraid of the light.

They’re afraid of you.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

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