November 4, 2016 at 1:37 p.m.
The public safety committee, corporation counsel should be replaced
The public safety committee, corporation counsel should be replaced
Nay, nay, no it's not. We have a landslide winner as the top opponent of transparency in all of Wisconsin: Oneida County corporation counsel Brian Desmond.
It isn't even close. He has earned a spectacular string of "Fs" in our annual open records grades. He has consistently tried to obstruct the flow of information to the public, and has given bone-headed legal advice over and over again, based not on any competent reading of the open records law but on his dislike of the law, period.
Now, thanks to sheriff Grady Hartman, we know he is responsible for the county's colossal and embarrassing defeat in court, where the county tried to cover up an accusation of rape against a police officer who resigned but, with the allegation firmly swept beneath the rug, went merrily on his way to another law-enforcement job in another county.
Had it not been for this newspaper's lawsuit, had the corporation counsel's bad legal advice carried the day without being challenged, accused rapist Lee Lech would be working still, his new co-workers and community completely unaware of the egregious reason he landed among them in the first place.
Thankfully, the county could not sweep such a charge under the rug forever, but taxpayers had to unnecessarily cough up $50,000 to clean the carpet and air the suspected dirty cop.
Thanks Brian! They should put a statue of Desmond in the lobby of the state capitol that Mary Czaja, Tom Tiffany, Scott Walker, Jon Erpenbach, Mark Miller and all the other champions of secrecy could bow to on their way to work.
The sad truth is, the citizens of Oneida County have not one elected official they can count on for transparency, and that's especially so in county government.
District attorney Michael Schiek is a worthless buffoon who knows no embarrassment. This dim bulb telegraphed that Oneida County was a back-room politician's paradise after concluding in 2013 that LUHS violated the open records law, but, hey, deserved no citations or consequences.
In effect, he invited public officials to break the law on his watch.
Meanwhile, the 21 members of the board of supervisors don't have one complete backbone put together. Unlike past county boards, these officials kowtow 100 percent of the time to Desmond. They jump when he says jump, only summoning up the nerve to ask how high.
Which brings us to the public safety committee. That committee should resign immediately, and county board chairman Dave Hintz should choose appointees to take their place. In the past month, the committee has aptly demonstrated it is completely impotent as a committee of jurisdiction over the sheriff's department.
First, it has little oversight power given to it by the county code, and it has abdicated what oversight responsibilities it does have. Inside the sheriff's department there were charges of rape, abetting underage drinking, out-of-control out-of-town training sessions, a selective policy of DUI enforcement, and on and on - and the public safety committee had no idea any of it was happening and no idea of the complaints and lawsuits all around them.
Talk about heads stuck in the sand. It's more like heads stuck in cement.
Second, when The Times won the case and the records were released, and after Times publisher Gregg Walker pressed the committee for the name of the attorney who gave that bad advice, the committee circled the wagons around the corporation counsel and protected him.
Perhaps Desmond ordered them to protect him, since they seem to serve at his beck and call. To be sure, Desmond wrote his own letter for the committee to sign declaring their support for him. And they signed it.
Likely as not, Desmond simply told them they needed to sign that letter of support, and the committee picked up their pens and asked, How high?!
Desmond was clever in his letter of self-promotion, too, not only maneuvering the committee to offer him general support but to absurdly support his specific handling of the open records case he lost.
That means the committee members approved of the bad legal advice Desmond gave the sheriff; they approved of his attempt to cover up a serious charge of sexual assault; and it means they approved of sticking the taxpayers with a $50,000 bill for trying to protect a cop besieged with complaints and an accusation of rape.
So we have established that the public safety committee exercises no oversight of the sheriff's department, that it does everything the corporation counsel says must be done, that they approve of bad legal advice when it serves narrow bureaucratic interests, and they are willing to go along with a cover up of serious allegations against county employees, even if means making taxpayers pay thousands and thousands of dollars.
There's more. For months Walker asked the committee members to identify the attorney who gave the bad legal advice so the public could know who it was. They repeatedly refused to do so, though the county's residents clearly have a right to know who was protecting the alleged perpetrator and who was advising the county to go to court to do so.
We now know it was Desmond, first and foremost, but only because the sheriff told us, not the committee. We certainly have our disagreements with Hartman, but we commend the sheriff in this instance of forthrightness. For again, the public has a right to know.
The committee may argue that they could not speak because of attorney-client privilege, but that's a red herring. The attorney-client privilege is there to protect the client, not the attorney, and the client can break the privilege at any time.
There's no protection for incompetence or malicious counsel. The truth is, on top of everything else, by not answering the question and by not fingering Desmond, the committee has proven its own disdain for transparency and open government. For there is a compelling public interest - and public safety interest - in exposing the allegations the county tried to cover up, and there's a compelling public interest in knowing who the architect of that coverup was inside the courthouse.
Now we all know it was Desmond, and yet the public safety committee has continued in its unwavering support of him. By aiding and abetting him Desmond in this matter, the public safety committee should be ashamed to even use the term "public safety."
This committee has accomplished about as much good for the county as has the grievance committee, which has never met. But it has done a lot of damage.
By its after-the-fact complicity in this attempted cover-up, and its support for the corporation counsel's actions leading to lengthy and costly and unsuccessful litigation, this committee is permanently tainted.
The public safety committee and the corporation counsel should be replaced.
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