Eastbayri.com

For a group that is supposedly all about efficiency and openness, the Tiverton Town Council’s move to muzzle town department heads is a contradictory and disappointing change of course.

Just as strange is the way the council did it.

It took this action during a closed session whose only announced legal purpose was a performance review of the town administrator. There was no vote and the administrator was left to make the announcement.

Henceforth, he was directed to say, all press contacts with any town employee must be cleared and arranged by the town administrator.

No reason was offered other than an after-the-fact comment by a councilor that the charter calls for the administrator to be the official town spokesman (it says no such thing).

Had it wished to see how such systems work, the council might have asked the Westport schools whose previous superintendent issued a similar edict in the interest, she said, of accuracy.

There’s no evidence that it did much for accuracy, but the policy did accomplish other things.

It enabled her (and will allow Tiverton) to screen questions, sanitize answers and put the right spin on things. Answers, when they finally arrived, were big on officialese but short on spontaneity or interest. And they often dodged the question’s point entirely with little opportunity for follow-up.

It created a news logjam. The simplest of questions had to be funneled first through the superintendent, then to the teacher or department head, and often back to the superintendent. The superintendent is unavailable? Too bad.

It wasted employee time, taxpayer dollars and led to the loss of stories that parents and students might have enjoyed. By the time a teacher’s request for news coverage had undergone scrutiny and approval, the event, often as not, had come and gone.

Surely Tiverton’s town administrator has better things to do than intervene whenever a reporter wants to ask the public works director about a broken sign or call the library director about sending a photographer to story hour.

That Westport superintendent is gone now and one of the first things her replacement did, with the school committee’s blessing, was to restore direct lines of communication between the public and school staff.

As was the case in Westport, Tiverton’s policy seems less about efficiency than control — and a disturbing lack of faith in its own employees.

No wonder the council chose to hide behind closed doors to sneak this one through.