Truth is, they really don’t care.

Last week, after initially saying they would, Northern District Highway Commissioner Bill Minor and Southern District Highway Commissioner Wayne Brown said they won’t object to a preliminary ruling that they violated the state’s open meetings law.

The complaint was filed by the third elected highway czar in Mississippi, Central District Commissioner Dick Hall, who was not invited to a dinner meeting at which the other two commissioners discussed with Madison County officials an Interstate 55 interchange project. Madison County is in Hall’s district. He and the other two commissioners are in a long-running feud, much of it centered on their appointee as executive director, Butch Brown.

While Minor told the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal of Tupelo he wanted to put the incident behind him, he also said he plans to ask the Ethics Commission for clarification on the open meetings law.

“I don’t think we did anything wrong,” Minor said. “I was invited to a dinner. They asked a question about the interchange, and we told them we did not have any more money for it.”

Clarification? Mississippi’s open meetings law is not the do-all to end-all, but it’s certainly not ambiguous about (1) empowering the public to sit in on discussions of public projects and (2) including social gatherings where such discussions occur. It’s well-settled law, but very frequently ignored — especially by highway commissioners who apparently don’t think even the commissioner elected from the district needed to know about the session.

Officials should conduct the public’s business in public, but not much happens if they don’t. The state Ethics Commission, now empowered to review complaints, has only the power to (1) advise the commissioners not to do it again and/or (2) impose a $100 fine to be paid with state funds, not with money of the people who ignored the law.

This was probably a small-potatoes meeting. But the principle is not. Officials need to understand their jobs are easier and governments progress through openness and by keeping people informed. Making deals over steak dinners in quiet restaurants just feeds the public’s skepticism.