It seems that the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. is once again making a point of keeping the public in the dark. This time, the secrecy regards the process for choosing a jury for the memorial competition that is scheduled to launch on April 28. As our Julia Levy reports at page 3 of today’s New York Sun, the LMDC held a press conference yesterday to announce that it would announce the jury’s members within days, but then refused to answer questions regarding how this jury is being picked. Officials even refused to divulge what types of people are being considered.

This is of a piece with the LMDC’s behavior during the selection of the site plan earlier this year. Key decisions during that process — including a meeting of a steering committee that included representatives of the LMDC, the Port Authority, the state, and the city — were held behind closed doors. This has previously drawn the attention of the executive director of the state’s Committee on Open Government, Robert Freeman, who told the Sun that if more than half of the LMDC’s board — or half of a committee or subcommittee — gets together to talk business, the meeting should be open.

While we have long held the belief that this entire process should be in the hands of the man with a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center site, Larry Silverstein, the process as it has been undertaken is a public one. While a private developer would have the right to secrecy and privacy, a public entity such as the LMDC has a responsibility to be transparent. The open-government movement has its excesses, but the LMDC continues to give us public-sector decisions made in private — the worst of both worlds.