Ever since I read about a Lewis County resolution that allows for meetings of the commissioners without additional notice, it hasn’t felt right to me.
Resolution 09-262 — detailed in in The Chronicle back on March 3 — was passed in 2009 by former commissioners Ron Averill, Bill Schulte and Lee Grose with the input of former Prosecutor Michael Golden. In essence, the resolution states that the Lewis County Board of Commissioners is in a scheduled, regular meeting every Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
It essentially means the county commissioners can meet and discuss any topic without allowing the people they represent to see them at work, which is the whole point of state public meeting laws.
The resolution itself mentions a “desire to extend the time and frequency of their regular meeting times to provide greater flexibility in the administration of County business …” and that “it is in the public interest to adopt a schedule of additional Board of County Commissioner meetings; …”
But if the commissioners aren’t required to provide 24 hours notice for a public meeting, or the provided agenda is overly simplistic or the weekly calendar isn’t updated as meetings later in the week are added, does it really benefit the public or better facilitate public record?
“Greater flexibility” usually means more loopholes, in my experience. At the very least, the resolution certainly doesn’t feel like it aligns with the legal “spirit” of Washington state’s open meetings laws.
Turns out, the Washington Coalition for Open Government would like to weigh in on that matter as well.
WCOG advocates for the people’s right to access government information. The independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization champions Washington’s open government laws and takes legal actions to defend them. The group is comprised of citizen activists, current and former government officials, and representatives of business, labor, media, law and public policy organizations.
WCOG’s website notes: “Often with good intentions, governments tend toward closure and withholding information that legitimately should be public.”
I believe that to be the case here, in Lewis County.
Political expediency seems to have run roughshod over public record and open meeting laws. Toby Nixon, city of Kirkland council member and current president of WCOG, was inclined to agree with me.
In a conversation with Nixon on Thursday, he informed me that WCOG has filed its own public records request to examine the county’s current system for meetings and minutes. WCOG will be looking at two major things: (1) Are the commissioners keeping a proper set of minutes, and (2) are they issuing an agenda that covers everything?
“Right now, we’re just filing requests to see how close they (minutes and agendas) are ... my guess is that they aren’t even close,” Nixon said, after reviewing meeting minutes previously obtained by The Chronicle.
After reviewing the results of its records request, WCOG will decide what — if any — legal action is appropriate. According to Nixon, that could include anything from a letter to the county all the way up to a lawsuit if the county fails to adequately respond (WCOG is working on two other public record lawsuits currently).
Nixon pointed out that, according to RCW 42.30.077 (passed in 2014), if the commissioners are in a regular meeting every weekday, there should be a full day’s agenda of county business posted on the county’s website at least 24 hours in advance every single work day.
As of the writing of this column, agendas for various past “regular meeting” dates were missing on the Board of County Commissioners’ online calendar. Entire days and other blocks of time had no agenda items, despite being “in session.”
The commissioners currently produce a weekly list of scheduled meetings and events that are likely to attract a quorum. “Official BOCC meetings” are listed with an asterisk indicating they are open to the public. In reality, if the commissioners are always in session, despite an item not being marked as an “official” meeting, their discussions should always be open to the public. But nothing on the weekly calendars issued prior to the March 3 Chronicle article on the 2009 resolution indicates this to citizens.
The agenda template has since been updated to reflect that commissioners are in “open sessions” Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Commissioner Edna Fund claimed that the county’s current meeting schedule, adopted in 2009, was a “a state auditor’s recommendation at that time.” Interestingly, the state auditor at the time was Brian Sonntag, who is currently a board member of WCOG and is a 2013 inductee to the national Open Government Hall of Fame.
I’ll be curious to hear his opinions on this matter.
According to The Chronicle: “County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer told The Chronicle the commissioners can meet at any time between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. regardless of whether the meeting is on their agenda. He said the public can find out what happened after the fact using meeting minutes.”
Commissioner Fund also mentioned that the commissioners are allowed to meet without 24-hour notice on an “emergency basis” if they need to get information out quickly.
I have not found an “emergency” clause in Resolution 09-262, meaning the county can schedule meetings whenever they want under this arrangement — emergency or not. It appears completely arbitrary, as Meyer indicated.
If a meeting is not on the agenda beforehand, how does the public have any way of verifying that all minutes from all meetings are accounted for? And how would we confirm that the meeting minutes are complete and truthful? The old adage “if a tree falls in the forest” comes to mind.
If weekly meeting minutes are issued on Monday (or the week prior), but aren’t updated over the course of the week, or by Thursday for Friday’s “open session” as meetings are added later in the week, how can citizens possibly keep up? How easy is it to exploit that consistent loophole?
Where is the accountability in this system?
Recently, public records requests by myself have turned up meeting minutes for meetings over 30 minutes long with only 5-10 lines of notes with nebulous topics listed — some of them simply labeled “miscellaneous meeting.”
Are after-the-fact meeting minutes valuable if you can’t even read what was actually talked about or if there’s no context provided?
Nixon noted that, having been a member of a three-person commission once himself, he’s sympathetic to the challenges that the outdated format can create and understands why this seemed like an attractive solution. But he also notes, in light of open meeting laws, the current system utilized by the county could create some unique problems where public record is concerned.
“Do they (commissioners) really want this crowd following them around?” Nixon asked, when referencing the continuous “meeting” schedule. “I don’t think so,” he continued.
Nixon was also concerned about precedent — that, left unchecked, other counties in Washington with a three-commissioner format might try to adopt this same type of meeting schedule.
While it will be interesting to see what develops from WCOG’s investigation, this situation already serves as yet another reason that the discussion to start the home rule charter process to adopt a more modern, streamlined system of county government — with a larger commission format — needs to come to the forefront of community conversation.
Look at the past year. There has been dysfunction in the 911 Communications Center, infighting among commissioners, a hostile workplace lawsuit filed by a member of the commissioners’ office, a complete lack of financial transparency in the county-run run tourism website and a host of other concerning issues.
Those are just the controversies that made it to the public record.
Until there’s a change in the 2009 resolution, no one really knows exactly what our commissioners are up to and when, and that’s a problem deserving of additional scrutiny.
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Brittany Voie is The Chronicle’s senior media developer. She was campaign manager for Jonathan Meyer’s 2009 campaign for Lewis County Prosecutor. She can be reached at bvoie@chronline.com.
