EAST PROVIDENCE — The clock is ticking.

The city’s current contract with its teachers expires on Friday, and talks are at a deadlock. The sides can’t agree on ground rules and the sticking point is the School Committee’s demand that the bargaining be done in public.

“The union representatives say open negotiations will cause ‘grandstanding’ and ‘political maneuvering,’ ” City Councilman Robert Cusack said last week. “I think they’re lame excuses. It’s not a radical request or anything.”

He notes that at least four states require open negotiations.

Kansas requires open negotiations only on teachers contracts. Florida and Tennessee laws state that all negotiations with public employees unions must be held in public. In Minnesota, only the commissioner of the Bureau of Mediation Services can close negotiation sessions.

The public-versus-private debate intensified in California earlier this year when the city of Vallejo, a San Francisco suburb, filed for federal bankruptcy protection. Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit organization, wrote that “too much government secrecy” helped break the city’s financial back.

“Vallejo is broke, and other cities and counties may be close behind, because their personnel costs — salary and benefits for current employees and retirees — are higher than they can afford,” his online article read. “… If no one is watching, it’s easy for public officials to give generous pay and benefit increases without having a clue how to pay for them. That’s not so easy to do in a public session.”

Candidates in this and previous East Providence races have blamed most of the city’s present fiscal woes — a deficit of $4.2 million and growing — on the East Providence Education Association’s contract that expires on Oct. 31. It protects the city’s 500 or so educators, but, Cusack has said, it doesn’t protect taxpayers.

The city’s educators are the only teachers in Rhode Island who do not pay a percentage of their medical-insurance costs. Another contract provision, health insurance buybacks, allows teachers to receive up to $5,100 if they choose not to take coverage under the school’s health-insurance plan. That stipulation costs the city about $660,000 a year.

Sessions on a new contract began in August. The committee proposed that negotiations be held in public at City Hall and that the sessions be taped for airing on Cox Communications’ public access channel. When the union rejected that idea, the board proposed allowing at least two members of the news media attend the talks. That idea was rejected as well.

“The School Committee felt that the public had not been well served by prior negotiations that were held in secret,” the board contended in a complaint it filed late last month with the state Labor Relations Board. (A second complaint was filed a week later.) “It is the public’s money that is being spent and the public has a right to know what is being discussed.”

Union representative Jeanette Woolley said there is “no benefit to adding the potential for political maneuvering and public grandstanding to the delicate process of give and take.”

The sides didn’t meet again until last week. School Committee member Anthony Carcieri has announced that six mediation sessions are scheduled through the end of the month to reach an agreement on ground rules. If those talks fail, he said, the matter would go before an arbitrator next month.

With closed-door negotiations, the public does not get to see the compensation provisions until contracts are a “done deal,” said Scheer, of the California group.

“This cozy arrangement is very much in the unions’ interest, since transparency would risk public opposition, and very much in politicians’ interest, since they get to be generous with public funds without having to be responsible for them,” Scheer said. “Only one party is screwed: the public.”

apina@projo.com