SAXTONS RIVER — I understand that at FACT-TV's Feb. 10 forum for candidates for the Rockingham Free Public Library (RFPL) Board of Trustees, someone mentioned that I had broken Vermont's open meeting law six times.
This is not a good thing. However, if you reflect on it, it's also not a very high number of violations.
Just this week, on Sunday, one of the two trustees appointed to our board this summer - the one who is running for a three-year library position - violated open-meeting law by sending out a newsy email to all the trustees. He's been told time and again that this is breaking open meeting law but continues to do it.
About the same time, the other trustee appointed to our board this summer - the one who is not running for a library position - sent out yet another of her long multi-page letters to all the trustees. She does so on a regular basis. My favorite e-mail from her came about a month ago when she stated that she knew she was breaking open-meeting law in sending out that particular email but that she had to - it was important.
My point is not that these two are terrible people for breaking open-meeting law. My point is it is hard not to break open-meeting law.
The concept of open-meeting law is solid and laudable; we do want transparent government, and we do want citizens to be able to offer their opinions and insights at public meetings. But the current rules for open-meeting law make it almost impossible to follow the law without breaking it, and that is what is happening in many places, including our own town.
My understanding is the legislature is going back and reviewing the open-meeting law details; my hope is they have the intention of making the law more user-friendly.
This would be a good thing to do in my opinion because, ultimately, you don't want a law in place that people are not able to follow. You want public boards to be able to conduct their business and follow the open-meeting law - exactly - at the same time.
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But let's get back to me and my breaking of open-meeting law. In his Dec. 16, 2013 letter to me, Assistant Attorney General William B. Reynolds identified several instances where I broke open meeting law, and I agree with most of them.
Number 1: The RFPL Board of Trustees did have an illegal vote in May to close the library. We were following our bylaws, which turned out to be illegal when compared to Vermont law. This led to a lively discussion involving the secretary of state, the attorney general, and several other state officials that went on for several days at the state level. They decided late on a Friday afternoon that Vermont law trumped our bylaws and our board needed to revote.
I scheduled a meeting as quickly as I could get a quorum together, and we retook the vote. The attorney general complimented me for taking care of this matter so quickly: I understand one of the library trustee candidates up for election - the one who is currently on the board because the Selectboard put him there - was critical of this at the candidate's forum.
Number 2: I denied a citizen the right to speak at a July meeting. I did do this, as I told the attorney general. After the occurrence I went out on my own and researched the law, made the correction, and did not wait for the complaint from citizens to be made. I told this to the attorney general when he wrote me about the complaint.
In that letter, I also explained to him that I was following a precedent set by the Bellows Falls Village Trustees where I and other Rockingham residents were denied the right to speak because we were not Bellows Falls residents.
Interestingly, this happened again at a January joint Selectboard-Trustees meeting., I raised my hand to point out to Bellows Falls Trustees Chair Roger Riccio that he was committing an open meeting law violation, but someone else in the audience beat me to it.
So I said I agreed with most of the attorney general's findings. My disagreements all center around Elayne Clift's complaints, which encompass only about one third of the attorney general's letter.
First disagreement: Bill Reynolds quotes from an April 3, 2013 e-mail I wrote - the contents of which we covered at our April 2013 trustees meeting - where the first part of the quote is given but the last part is not.
Basically, I said that if you have a quorum of the entire board showing up for a committee meeting, you have to warn the committee meeting as a full trustees' meeting because there cannot be a gathering of a quorum of trustees to discuss library business without warning it as a trustees' meeting. Otherwise, either the committee meeting could not be held, or some trustees would have to leave.
The clear message of my email and what I later said at the April 2013 trustees' meeting was that it was a simple matter of warning the committee/trustees meeting correctly so that any interested trustee could attend the meeting.
The terminated director, and some of her followers - including Ms. Clift - have continued to only give the first line of this e-mail message and contend my intent was to prevent committees from meeting. To quote one line out of context is a form of lying.
I did not know until receiving the assistant attorney general's letter that Ms. Clift had said this about this particular email, or I would have corrected the record with the attorney general earlier. If I had sent the attorney general the full email message, I would assume that he would have had no objection to what I wrote because it was correct.
Second disagreement: Ms. Clift again lifted a line from a Feb. 4, 2013 email about personnel committee meetings not being public meetings. She failed to report that it was an inadvertent error on my part - quickly corrected so that the phrase reads that executive sessions of personnel committee meetings are not public.
Ms. Clift has been corrected on this detail multiple times, so again I did not realize until receiving the assistant attorney general's letter that she had reported this email phrase to him without the correction. He correctly said that personnel meetings were public meetings; I'm sure he would agree that the executive sessions of personnel meetings are not.
Third disagreement: Ms. Clift apparently told the attorney general that I stated that the minutes of a meeting should include only votes taken with no discussion. I cannot account for this as a misinterpretation or twisting of my words on Ms. Clift's part; this one is a total fabrication (that's a synonym for “lying”).
As a matter of fact, twice in the past 18 months, in the fall of 2012 and again in the spring of 2013, I have brought in copies of the open meeting law for all trustees, and we have reviewed what the law has to say on minutes.
And it most definitely does not say that minutes should omit any discussion details; it does, however, say that minutes should not include a blow by blow accounting of the meeting's discussions and that every public official is responsible for taking his or her own notes to augment what the minutes have to say.
But minutes should certainly give a flavor of the discussions that take place, and I have always said so.
Fourth disagreement: No minutes of the Personnel Committee were posted on the RFPL website. This assertion is true; as a board, the trustees have decided to post only minutes of full trustees' meetings, not committee meetings. If members of the public want minutes of committee meetings, they can request them.
However, Mr. Reynolds knows quite well that minutes were kept of the personnel committee meetings as, when five Friends of the Library members wrote the original complaint to him in April 2013 (a complaint that Ms. Clift has apparently augmented as the year has gone on), one of the things he requested from our board was agendas and minutes for all committees for the preceding calendar year.
Interestingly, the only missing minutes were from two of those who signed the April letter - former board members Debbie Wetzel and Duane Whitehead - who could not produce some of the sets of minutes from the committees they chaired. The Personnel Committee's paperwork was in excellent order as was every other trustees' committee except for theirs.
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I am sorry to have gone on for so long, but linking my name to open meeting law violations in an effort to besmirch my reputation and my board's reputation has gone on for too long. The recent forum's aspersions from one of the candidates for the new library board - the one who was appointed by the Selectboard against trustees' wishes - made it clear to me that these charges should be answered.
I respect open meeting law. As a matter of fact, Pat Fowler and I were the only two library trustees who bothered to show up for the secretary of state's most informative November presentation. Certainly Ms. Clift was not present. My assumption is that attendance was not a high priority for her because that might involve getting her facts straight, and that does not appear to be what she is interested in. Character assassination, yes. Accurate fact reporting, no.
Lastly, I owe Mr. Reynolds a thank you.
Mr. Reynolds, I appreciate your careful attention to the details shared with you about our RFPL board. I appreciate all the time you have taken in listening to our citizens. I appreciate the fact that you saw and stated that neither I nor my board have ever intentionally violated open meeting law.
Your point is well taken that we should all continue to educate ourselves on the law. And we are endeavoring to do so. The November visit from the secretary of state was immensely helpful in that regard.
Thanks to all for listening.