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Law is flaunted
in Columbus
The North Carolina Public Records Law and Open Meetings laws are well-intended but don’t work when boards such as the Columbus County commissioners routinely find ways to skirt their intentions.
Rarely do the county commissioners not hold a closed session. The Open Meetings Law has many exceptions that allow boards to go into closed session and these exceptions are well-used here. The two most common exceptions are “attorney-client privilege” and “personnel.”
In their discussions about the ill-fated employee policy manual, the commissioners met illegally in a closed “personnel” session to talk about the manual. The law says that personnel sessions are allowed only to talk about specific people, not general policy issues like this one.
Hard to enforce
In every General Assembly session, the North Carolina Press Association proposes new legislation that would make government more open. As is the norm, however, the press association ends up spending more time fighting off proposals from groups like the League of Municipalities and Association of County Commissioners that propose laws to make government more secretive.
One recent improvement in the law, which the League of Municipalities and Association of County Commissioners fought tooth-and-nail, called for boards to keep minutes of closed sessions so that the public could reasonably understand what was discussed so long as the intent of the closed session was not usurped.
When a private citizen here recently asked for minutes to closed sessions, she got them, but what she got was essentially nothing.
The Open Meetings Law and Public Records Law are even harder to enforce. The public or a newspaper can sue a governing body over violations, which The News Reporter and The Tabor-Loris Tribune have done with the county over what we believe is a public record, but it often takes months before the case is resolved and thousands of dollars in legal fees. The case in question will be heard by the Court of Appeals in November.
Change of attitude
The attitude of the current board of commissioners, the county attorney and county manager seems to be that it’s O.K. to do much of the public’s business in secret.
We would hope that just one of them would take the attitude of the late Jake Jones, a former Whiteville City Council member and mayor pro-tem.
Jones abhorred closed sessions. When the city had a closed session, The News Reporter could rest assured that Jones would relay every single detail. Granted, some of it was off the record, but there was nothing secret about Whiteville’s closed session so long as Jones was there. The city attorney, Carlton Williamson, does a good job letting council members know when discussions exceed the limits of the purpose of the closed session. Other municipal attorneys do the same at their respective board meetings.
But all is not lost. New county commissioners will be sworn in after the Nov. 7 elections. Citizens should demand of these candidates that they pledge to make county government more open once they get into office.
We also ask our readers to look closely at the questions The News Reporter has posed each candidate about their positions on open government when their profiles appear in the paper.
Changes also need to be made in the Open Meetings Law and Public Records Law in the General Assembly to limit exceptions and give them teeth. Sen. R.C. Soles can usually be counted on to support open government initiatives and is seen by the Press Association as a friend of these initiatives. Rep. Dewey Hill’s record isn’t quite as clear. We encourage both – or their challengers if elected – to support open government initiatives, and for the people to ask this of them.
One of the cornerstones of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is a system of government where the people fully participate in decisions that affect their daily lives.
Can we honestly say that’s the case here?