Monday night’s meeting of the Law Enforcement Study Committee included many beautiful statements about how fair and neutral it would be.The group is looking into the funding of law enforcement, and to some degree, how services are delivered through the city of Luverne contract. For all the assumptions of steering the group toward his own agenda, Luverne City Administrator Greg LaFond said he wouldn’t lead the meetings and invited the group to set its agenda and ask for more participation outside City Hall. Luverne Finance Director Barb Berghorst was on hand for information but said she’d leave the meetings if it made committee members feel awkward, or as if it was a "city" function. With all the talk of cooperation and fairness, I felt like I was sitting in the middle of a folk song. ... Then the record skipped. Committee members said they would look into whether they can close their meetings. So much for first impressions.Committee meetings of public bodies are — according to Minnsota’s Open Meeting Law — open to the public, but this group is seeking a lawyer’s opinion on that.If a group like this, appointed by a government body to make recommendations to the government body, doesn’t want its opinions in the public, then it shouldn’t bother meeting. Who would give their findings any credit? How could we believe their research was as fair as they promised?The information in the meetings isn’t going to be private data, and I bet committee members will share their opinions and findings with their friends and family members. Then that information will float through the gossip streams and we won’t even have an account of what they did on the record. Not talking openly and sharing opinions is what got the county and city in trouble in the first place.Even if the committee finds a loophole in the open meeting law, shame on them for closing meetings that involve the most talked about local issue for more than a year. Law enforcement is an important arm of our local governments. Open meetings are also an important aspect of those governments. A political authority of the people, without adequate information to the people, is a joke. Frankly, there’s nothing funny about what the law enforcement committee is studying.