Sunshine and closed sessions
Published March 18, 2015
Editorial by Asheville Citizen-Times, March 13, 2015.
Clarity is lacking among local county governments regarding open meeting laws, a Carolina Public Press investigation coming in Sunday’s Citizen-Times indicates. The report outlines rules on when a county board can go into closed session. Generally a closed session will deal one of four areas: property acquisition, legal matters such as lawsuits, economic development and personnel issues.
That part is clear. Things get hazy in the aftermath, however, when it comes to the how/when/if regarding the release of minutes of those closed sessions.
A number of the 18 westernmost counties in North Carolina, including Buncombe, Haywood and Graham, try their best to establish a default setting of openness by reviewing and releasing minutes of closed meetings in a timely manner. Some records were released in response to records requests. Three counties didn’t even respond to CPP’s query.
Overall the forecast for this year’s Sunshine Week, an annual event where open-government advocates and media outlets push for government transparency, is cloudy in WNC.
Graham County, WNC’s smallest, held 31 closed sessions in 2014. The region’s largest county, Buncombe, held 16. Henderson discussed 52 agenda items in closed session; Yancey discussed all of two.
All told, boards of commissioners in the 15 counties where numbers were available held 294 closed sessions in 2014. Seventy-five percent of the minutes from those meetings remain locked away from the prying eyes of the public.
Part of the issue is that new commissioners are often unversed in the parameters of open meetings law. Frayda Bluestein, a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Government, says “One misconception that’s pretty common is that they can go into closed session to talk about the relationship among themselves. If they’re having problems with a board member or the mayor or something like that, that that’s something you can go into closed session to talk about. The statute specifically says they can’t.
“Probably the most common misconception is that it’s illegal to talk (publicly) about what happens in closed sessions, and that’s not entirely true.”
Ignorance of the law is no excuse for ordinary citizens, and it shouldn’t be for county commissioners, either.
So allow us to provide some clarity: State statutes say closed session minutes must be kept in a form detailed to the point a “person not in attendance would have a reasonable understanding of what transpired.”
Those minutes are public records. North Carolina Public Records Law says minutes can be withheld “so long as public inspection would frustrate the purpose of the closed session.”
In other words, when the reason for a closed session has gone away, the minutes should be made available.
Sooner, rather than later.
This is not a government vs. citizen issue, a “them’’ vs. “us.’’ That’s because “them’’ is “us.’’ Government derives from the people, who duly elect their representatives and pay for their works.
It’s not their business. It’s yours.
And Sunshine is necessary for it to function properly.
