March 22, 2017 at 3:50 p.m.
Oops! They did it again
Oops! They did it again
Just a month after undergoing open-meetings law training - at the last county board meeting in fact - the Oneida County Board of Supervisors has violated the open meetings law, as The River News reports today.
As Nick Sabato reports, the board violated the statute by putting a generic catch-all item on its meeting agenda: Other business.
As the Department of Justice open-meetings law compliance manual points out, these generic agenda items are not allowed: "Purely generic subject matter designations such as 'old business,' 'new business,' 'miscellaneous business,' 'agenda revisions,' or 'such other matters as are authorized by law' are insufficient because, standing alone, they identify no particular subjects at all."
That is to say, items such as "other business" allow supervisors to evade the open-meetings law by discussing public business that they don't identify or specify on the meeting agenda.
And that's exactly what happened this Tuesday in Oneida County.
As Sabato points out, supervisors Bob Mott and Billy Fried both made statements under the item, Mott talking about a contest at Lakeland Union High School and Fried about "surveys sent by a student through UW-Extension, which then led Hintz to allow county clerk Tracy Hartman to bring the other supervisors up to speed."
These topics might seem innocuous, but what's innocuous to one person might not be to another, and the public has a right to know what is going to be discussed, whether it is a LUHS contest or a multi-million dollar public works project. It doesn't matter.
When officials can decide what's important enough to identify on an agenda and what is not, the open-meetings law is dead.
What's worse in this situation, last month in its open-meetings training workshop, the county was explicitly warned about generic agenda items. The attorney giving the seminar, Lori Lubinsky, is no friend of open government, but even she told the supervisors they could not get way with such generic agenda postings.
Her answer came after she was asked about "specific generic agenda items where all kinds of things get talked about under it."
"That's a no-no," Lubinsky said. "That's right in the DOJ compliance manual. It used to be that people would say, 'chair's report,' or a president's report. That is not proper notice under the open meetings law."
Certainly there can be no more generic an item that invites discussion on all sorts of unnamed public issues than one called 'other business.' The DOJ compliance manual warns about it; Lubinsky warned about it; and yet the county in its very next meeting puts such an item on an agenda.
What are we to think about such behavior? A couple of things.
First, as we observed a couple of editions ago, the good-old-boy game in Oneida County is growing old. We keep hearing county board chairman Dave Hintz say they all have the best of intentions, but good intentions must be backed up by good actions to satisfy the law and the public interest.
They can all put "We had the best of intentions" on their tombstones, but it won't matter much if they buried open government right next to them.
The day of giving the board the benefit of the doubt because of its very good intentions has come and gone. Supervisors must be held accountable for breaking the law.
This is especially the case when they were warned in an open-meetings seminar about that very infraction just a month earlier.
In this situation, as egregious as it is, we believe district attorney Michael Schiek should find each member of the board guilty of an open-meetings infraction, and we believe he should fine them to the fullest extent of the law, $300 for each supervisor.
These fines, because they cannot be paid by the county or by the county's insurance company, might make a difference in the behavior of board members once they begin to pile up.
The second thing is, and it's a point we make repeatedly, corporation counsel Brian Desmond should be fired. He has repeatedly shown his intransigence and opposition to open government at every level and in every form, and this is simply another example.
At the very least, the corporation counsel should be looking at what is on the county board agenda, if not at the agendas of all committees. He should have easily spotted the illegal item - he is the county attorney, after all - and had it removed, and issued an amended agenda.
According to the agenda, the agenda was posted and the media notified on March 16, fully five days before the county board meeting. Are we to assume that Desmond did not look at the agenda during those five days prior to the meeting?
Or are we to assume that he did look at the agenda and simply did not catch the illegality?
Or, are we to assume that he noticed it and brazenly ignored it because of his opposition to transparency?
In the first case, Desmond would be negligent; in the second case, incompetent; in the third, an advocate of breaking the open-meetings law.
No matter which one applies - and one of them must - he should terminated, at long last. And county board members should be fined to the maximum extent, at long last. It's time they take accountability seriously.
Or it's time for us to say, Oops! We voted them all out of office.
Comments:
You must login to comment.