News-Record.com

Commissioner Carolyn Coleman called up this morning to ask whether a line we used in today's story on the county commissioners was true.

As a boilerplate, let's assume that journalism, as a whole, is as truthful, fair and balanced as humans can accomplish.

Now, then. Here's the line:

An official gathering of members of a public body must happen in public with minutes documented. A group can meet and correspond informally, unless, according to the law, the meeting is "held to evade the spirit and purposes of this Article."

"If board members devised a plan to corral votes behind the scenes and in a way that evades the spirit of the open meetings law, I believe you do have an argument that what they did violated the law," Ashley Matlock Perkinson, an attorney for the N.C. Press Association, wrote in an e-mail.

Which was in reference to the calls made by commissioners Chairman Melvin "Skip" Alston and vice chairman Steve Arnold to gather support on the Board of Commissioners to remove David McNeill and Ben Brown's position - which led to McNeill's retirement and Brown's resignation.

"To me, this is nothing new," Coleman said, "this is the way that business had been done since I had been on the board."

She said that often a commissioner will bring up an idea and pass it around the commissioners to see if it has support before going public with it. Depending on your view, to some, it's shopping an idea. To others, it may be working back-room deals.

Whatever you call it, Coleman is right - those types of talks among commissioners are nothing new. When working on the 2008-09 budget, the commissioners privately discussed deals in the weeks ahead of the official vote.

"Commissioner A decides that he wants to do something, and he approaches Commissioner B and tells him and calls Commissioner C and tells him," Coleman said, giving an example of how the talks progress. "All you're doing is sharing your idea."

Scoop isn't so naive as to think that there's no chit-chat behind closed doors. But the public should be well aware that those conversations, under law, don't have to occur privately between commissioners. Also, we know that all humans are prone to err, and your elected representatives tend to forget the state rules which govern their actions.

In the case of the county manager and the talks that led to his departure, those conversations could have happened in an official meeting, but in a closed session. The minutes of the meeting would have still been recorded, even if they were never released to the public.

Let's drill down a little more. When asked if she believed that the conversations between commissioners that gathered the votes to fire McNeill should occur before the public (even if in closed session), Coleman said:

"I will not give you an explicit answer because it’s not that simple."

and

"You want me to say 'yes' or 'no'," she said. "First of all I would have to admit that I’m trying to avoid the open meetings law."

So, about the conversation itself?

"I don’t think it’s wrong," she said, "the caveat being trying to avoid the open meetings law, and if you do that then it is wrong."

You be the judge. Of course, we journalism types are inclined to get as much information on things as we can, so it's somewhat obvious where our loyalties lie. In this case, it's to access information dealing with the public's money.

Put much more bluntly, Friend-of-Scoop and N&R online reporter John Newsom said this about private meetings, "You better have a good ------- reason."

While on the topic of McNeill, Kay Cashion called us this morning with this message. Apparently she has been out of town in the last week or so.

"I was not one of the group making the decisions to release the manager or attorney," she said.

Nobody called her about the issue, either.

"The chair (Alston) had not made me aware of what his plans are," Cashion said about the plans to remove McNeill and Brown.

A few questions:

Who did know? Was it the full board? Was there any opportunity given for someone to oppose McNeill's removal?

Even if McNeill's predecessor Willie Best was fired in an extremely charged meeting, at least it occurred in the public eye.