No. Just no.

City Councilman Kol Medina has asked his fellow council members to consider a change that would do away with Bainbridge’s policy that requires citizen volunteers on its advisory committees to comply with the state Open Public Meetings Act.

City officials note that some volunteers have recently complained about having to meet the requirements of the law, which includes a mandate that meetings be noticed to the public and open to the public.

The Open Public Meetings Act prohibits secret meetings of a majority of a public body, such as the city council, planning commission and Design Review Board, with few exceptions.

Many islanders can readily recall the city’s troubles in recent years in complying with Washington’s sunshine laws, and the superior court lawsuit that cost Bainbridge Island hundreds of thousands of dollars due to the city’s refusal to release public records.

That said, the city has since made great strides in conducting consistent training sessions for council members, commissioners and other advisory board members of the requirements of the laws covering public meetings and records.

Criticism of the restrictions mandated by the Open Public Meetings Act have been heightened, however, since the creation of the city’s Climate Change Advisory Committee.

That new committee was formed to advise the city council, city manager and planning staff on issues related to climate change.

But some of those committee members have apparently complained that they have a lot of work to do, and much that they want to accomplish quickly, but are being hamstrung because they must meet as a group and can’t have discussions via email in between meetings. (Such email activity is considered a “rolling” or “serial” meeting under the law, and is prohibited.)

City officials note that its citizen advisory committees, in many cases, are not legally subject to the Open Public Meetings Act, but it’s been the city’s policy to have all of its volunteer committees comply with the law.

Now, it seems, that’s an insufferable thing to ask of citizen volunteers.

In defense of the idea, one councilman noted that any emails sent between Climate Change Advisory Committee members would be public records that could be requested and reviewed. Allowing city volunteers freer reign in avoiding the constraints of the Open Public Meetings Act could be a “forward thinking proposal,” he said.

Councilman Ron Peltier sees it differently — and correctly.

“I’m completely against special rules for committees. That’s a slippery slope,” he told his fellow council members this week.

It erodes openness and transparency, he said. And there’s the “haystack” hurdle, as well: Citizens who want a full view of what was happening in committee would have to not only submit a records request and wait for a response from the city, but know beforehand what they were looking for and know who sent what to whom.

If the seven-member climate committee wants to speed things along, Peltier added, it could create subcommittees of less than a quorum to take up some of the committee’s work.

Peltier, of course, is correct. True transparency should not be sacrificed for claims of convenience.