River News: Our View

Try to imagine a world in which government officials engage in all sorts of rogue behavior or misconduct and are never held accountable.

Imagine if powerful officials used their positions to get their children on major corporate boards and to grease the skids for lucrative foreign contracts. Imagine a world where bureaucrats ignored election laws and instead allowed voter conduct known to lead to fraudulent outcomes.

Imagine a world in which border laws were not only ignored but any attempt to stop a de facto foreign invasion was prohibited by the government in power.

Just imagine if none of these officials were ever held accountable.

Oh wait. All that sounds perilously close to real life here in Wisconsin and in the nation. Political corruption is simply sanitized in the corporate media, and the corrupt officials just keep on being corrupt without ever being held accountable.

That scenario sounds very much like the description of a nation in its twilight, and there’s no doubt that is where America is right now.

But there’s an even worse cancer eating its way through the insides of our nation. It cannot be boiled down to this or that national issue or ideological stance but takes many different forms as it invades virtually every local government in America.

It pops up in many different forums, but it is in the end the same violation of values and laws and traditions as we see on the national stage. It is the same lack of accountability. 

Imagine some of these scenarios on the local level.

Imagine a rogue corporation counsel who not only advises elected officials to break county code by postponing an ongoing vote but who then secretly negotiates, out of the public eye, with the attorneys for the subject of that vote, undermining due process and public participation in the process.

Imagine there are no consequences.

Imagine the public officials who took the counsel’s bait and broke the law and fessed up. Imagine them to be good public servants who got misled but who were willing to stand up and take their medicine because it was — bad advice or not —  their responsibility in the end.

But imagine there was no medicine for them to take. No accountability.

Imagine a world in which the quorum of a local government body decides to gather information at a presentation on an important issue their government will vote on, but they do not post the meeting. Imagine that no one could identify the source of the information or its credibility. 

Imagine if there was no accountability when it was discovered that they did so. What message would that send to other local officials?

We don’t have to imagine these scenarios, of course, for they are happening in our very own communities.

The first scenario happened this past year with Oneida County and its dealing with a permit application by Kirk Bangstad. The second scenario is in Lake Tomahawk, a story about which we have reported these past few weeks.

What’s scary is that these and similar scenarios play out every week in local governments across the state and country, and rarely are there any consequences. If it can be said that democracy dies in darkness, it can also be said that the darkness is descending not only in national politics but in the shadows of our towns and counties.

All of which is why we keep calling for those with prosecutorial and supervisory powers to hold officials accountable when they violate open government laws. 

When the Oneida County corporation counsel advised the county’s zoning committee to illegally adjourn a meeting in the middle of a vote, saving the day for a permit applicant, and then meeting with that applicant’s attorney before the next committee meeting — totally undermining due process and, we believe, breaking open meetings laws — he should have been fired.

And while the zoning committee was misled, and county board chairman Scott Holewinski took responsibility for the illegal adjournment, those zoning committee members involved should have been cited. They weren’t.

Now, with the apparent violation of the open meetings law in Lake Tomahawk, with town chairman George DeMet acknowledging the lack of proper posting, there should be citations.

As we point out in a letter to Oneida County district attorney Jillian Pfeifer (reported in today’s edition), it matters not that this latest apparent infraction was without malicious intent. It matters not that it seems minor.

The truth is, there is no such thing as a minor infraction of an open government law, precisely because they have a cumulative effect. Each so-called “technical” or “minor” infraction adds a burden and weight to the stack of all the others — it’s death by a thousand cuts.

Our state and our nation are at the point of bleeding to death. Meting out consequences for violations of the law is long overdue.

There are deeper ramifications, as we point out in a complaint sent to the district attorney.

First, these officials pass laws and regulations we must all follow, and, when we don’t, we get cited and fined or worse. Simply apologizing doesn’t let us off the hook, and it shouldn’t, just as it shouldn’t for these officials.

Second, and more substantively into the matter of the law, there might be some question whether town chairman George DeMet and supervisor Lenore Lopez were actually conducting government business by attending an unposted presentation on wake boat regulations.

Until a few years ago, there would have been no question that they were conducting government business. The courts had long held that government business “refers to any formal or informal action, including discussion, decision, or information gathering, on matters within the governmental body’s realm of authority.”

That’s exactly what DeMet and Lopez were doing. They were gathering information about enhanced wake boat regulations that the town board is expected to vote on. They were conducting government business.

Only they were doing so without telling anyone they would be doing so. Again, as we have argued, that thwarted the public’s ability to attend that same presentation, to know who the town board members are relying on for sound information, and to potentially counter any misinformation they think was being presented, if any.

In short, not posting the meeting short-circuited due process, and on a currently hot button issue in the Northwoods.

To be sure, as we also noted, a decision several years back by circuit court judge Michael Bloom muddied the waters. He ruled essentially that, for government business to take place, an actual vote has to be taken or planned. In other words, attending a presentation — or even a town board meeting — where no action is scheduled but issues are merely discussed isn’t even government business and doesn’t have to be posted.

That’s absurd, of course. An appeals court upheld him, but it did not go so far, merely finding that the specific circumstances of the decision did not amount to a so-called “walking quorum,” and, in any event, the appeals decision was not recommended for publication, which robbed it of any precedential authority.

The case law on what is government business thus remains contested and contradictory, and in the meantime we believe a longstanding Supreme Court decision holds sway, namely, that government business “refers to any formal or informal action, including discussion, decision, or information gathering, on matters within the governmental body’s realm of authority,” which was the case in the Lake Tomahawk situation.

Finally we would add that local town and county boards need to be especially wary these days about roving environmental troubadours, especially those peddling presentations of wake boat regulations. We have not heard any of these presentations, but this is not the first time that the lack of transparency has come into play involving them. 

Apparently, our troubadours — they seem to be roving around the countryside like The Travelers — want only one side presented and do not want the public involved. All the more reason to be tough on violations of transparency laws in local government. 

That transparency may be the only weapon we have in the fight to uphold property rights and democracy. 

Ultimately, we don’t have to imagine a world in which rogue officials are never held accountable. That’s our reality. What we have to work hard to do is imagine a world in which transparency and accountability are the standards instead. 

After all, imagination is always the first step to fulfillment. Now is our time to take that step, and our time may be running out.