Through a Glass Darkly (Updated)

We're willing to be proved wrong, honestly. But as these things go, shadow5 tends to be pretty well clued in. So please, council, tell me I'm wrong. Via the City Clerk, Marcey Wisman, they did.

I learned this past week that the New Albany City Council held a full, formal educational meeting, purportedly of all nine members, without ever posting a public notice. Ms. Wisman has provided us with a copy of the notice, which she says was issued 7 days prior to a Feb. 20 meeting.

Here are the particulars. The council met as a body with Police Chief Greg Crabtree to discuss the police department's (and the administration's, we presume) needs and wants during this term. Although the meeting notice (which I still hadn't seen until Feb. 26) claimed the purpose of meeting to discuss "confidential" drug task force issues, I am informed that it was not limited to those subjects.

Said meeting was held without the public in attendance. No public notice was given. Purportedly, President Gahan designated the meeting as an "executive" session, one which the public would not have been allowed to observe in any event. But that does not relieve the council from posting and issuing public notice of the meeting, a fact that the City Clerk could have easily advised them of.

And if proper notice was given and merely missed by ALL local residents and media, the meeting would not have qualified as one where the public can be excluded.

Here is how the governing statute rules:

The council is subject to the Indiana Open Door Law (IC -14-1.5). No one will dispute that.

A meeting (of the council) is a gathering of a majority of the members...for the purpose of taking official action upon public business...with few exceptions, all meetings...are open to the public and may be observed and recorded...Many officials fail to understand the breadth of activities that constitute official action. "Official action" means to: 1. receive information 2. deliberate 3. make recommendations 4. establish policy 5. make decisions, or 6. take final action.

The mere act of receiving information is sufficient, when a majority of the members of the governing body is present, to require compliance with the Open Door Law.

Public notice must be given for all meetings, including executive sessions, at least 48 hours before the meeting.

We call on President Gahan to publicly apologize for this violation of the Open Door Law and to institute procedures to ensure that this council will not disrespect its constituents by future violations. Absent that, it's hard to see how lawsuit to obtain a declaratory judgment declaring the violation and enjoining the council from future violations can be avoided.

Ironically, this blog has called for just such a meeting to take place. We do not object to the council receiving information from the police department.

But to blithely convene such a meeting without public notice, or to hold such a meeting on proper notice but to misuse the "executive session" exceptions to the Open Door Law, is highly objectionable and cannot be countenanced.

We ask, as an aside, where the local media were on this?

And if we are wrong, if in fact a public notice was given, we apologize. Nonetheless, the issue is well worth raising. And if notice was given, it is still disturbing that the public was prevented from attending by the use of the pretense of the council meeting in "executive" session.

This meeting was clearly not eligible for the exemptions under the law. And it creates yet another cloud of suspicion over the openness of our city goverment. All who participated should issue public apologies immediately and pledge that no such violations will occur in the future.

The council must guard against holding private meetings under pretexts. Supposedly, at least some portion of the meeting included discussion of specific projects under investigation by the police. I seriously doubt that a discussion of such things in a public meeting would have compromised any investigation. And if seriously confidential investigative matters were discussed with the council, who has confidence that every single member of the council would be capable of keeping those confidences?

We have council members extremely closely tied to prime suspects under active investigation. How are some of these council members considered to have the judgment to keep confidential matters secret?

This briefing was, in all likelihood, general in scope and more of a P.R. session than anything. If so, it does not fall outside the Open Door Law, even if it was held in the offices of the city council counsel. And if it did qualify to be a closed meeting, should city council members be made privy to confidential investigative matters? Can they be trusted to keep those confidences 100 percent, to not use that information as political capital or as favors to friends?

We were apparently wrong about the improper notice, although I did not read of the meeting in any local media. We thank Ms. Wisman for responding to our inquiries and will point out that she, as city clerk, was not in attendance. She has assured us that a memorandum of the meeting will be prepared and made available to the public.