Council Members Do It In The Dark -- With Your Money

A majority of the Harrisonburg City Council members committed a crime after a January meeting when they reconvened in an unannounced secret meeting to discuss elementary school grade configurations.

There is no doubt the session was a meeting. The Virginia Freedom of Information Act defines a meeting as three members discussing public business. It was illegal on its face because it ignored the FOI requirement that it be announced. It also violated the spirit of the law, which requires that the public’s business be done in public. 

Here is what happened.

Prior to the council meeting, we met in a joint session with the school board, which had asked us nine months before to approve a building plan. The council had consistently refused to provide an answer, instead constantly asking for new information and delaying while awaiting the outcome of secret deals. During that joint session, there was at one point a full minute of silence, symbolic of relations between the two bodies for the past year. 

The council likewise had nothing to say to the school board during the regular session. This is not unusual, for this council or for other government bodies. Many public officials prefer to work out details in advance, in private, whether it’s legal to do so or not. The meeting itself can then be a PR session for the government. 

At the meeting in question, Councilman Hugh Lantz made notes with a red pen on the back of what appeared to be an agenda sheet during the meeting. After the meeting, and a legitimate closed session, we all should have left. 

As I was leaving my position at the center of the table, Lantz was saying to Councilwoman Carolyn Frank, “We could put these grades here… ” At the end of the table I stopped to discuss Payton Manning’s passing skills with the police chief and the vice mayor. While we dealt with that issue, I heard Lantz call Councilman Dorn Peterson over to join him and Frank. I stopped at the door to the council chambers and glanced back, watching their illegal meeting for a moment. Lantz looked up at Peterson and said, “Fine, I’ll call (school board chairman) Tom Mendez in the morning.”

My conclusion based on that evidence is that a majority of the city council decided to suggest a grade configuration to the school board, or to tell the board what configuration the council would accept. None of the council members involved in the meeting has challenged the interpretation – they’ve just denied the gathering happened.

Frank and Peterson ran for office on a platform of “Open and Responsive Government.” Lantz’s behavior is perhaps more forgivable in that he probably didn’t know he was doing anything wrong. He once bragged that he’d been on council ten years and didn’t know how to put something on the agenda.

Regardless, they tried to do the people’s business in private. That’s wrong. I don’t know what came of Lantz’s call to Mendez, or if he ever made it. Perhaps he was discouraged by my decision the next day to publicize the secret meeting in the local media.
 

Last Revised: 03.23.04    Publisher: Joseph Gus Fitzgerald
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