Tonight VICC held its first committee meeting since last January and only its second meeting of any kind since then. This doesn't mean a lot hasn't been going on outside its public meetings, especially regarding back-and-forth discussions with its two hired consultants.

One of the major points of discussion was how much public transparency should surround those discussions. VICC decided that its consultants' reports had to be technically public. But that left plenty of room to make those reports and their other deliberations practically private.

The VICC has now been meeting for close to 18 months, and it has still refused to publicly release either its draft constitution or its consultants' reports on that constitution. (And this doesn't even cover access to its meeting records, including detailed agendas, recordings, minutes, and reports.) I had been told last fall that after the draft constitution's legal review in early 2026, it would finally be made public. But it's not only June 2026 without that happening; it's now my sense that it will be many months before it happens.

At the last meeting in May, public notice, including Zoom access, was provided via email only five minutes before the meeting. I repeat: only five minutes before the meeting. This time, there was NO email public notice of the meeting, including the Zoom link. A public notice was published in a timely manner in the St. Thomas Source. But for those who had become dependent on email notification, there was no notification that that policy had been discontinued, at least for this meeting. Moreover, public notice in a newspaper's small print is no substitute for email notice, which is far more citizen-friendly for those who want to follow VICC's meetings.

Some of the newfound problems may be due to several of VICC's members running for USVI's legislature. This is a blatant conflict of interest, and why, say, Chile's recent constitutional convention banned delegates from running for such office. My guess is that one reason for the deterioration in VICC's transparency practices is directly related to such campaign-related incentives.