OPINION: City should have announced budget meetings in advance

We heard that during the Tim Madison investigation a few years ago. Barrow County BOC chairman Danny Yearwood has said that this newspaper made up some of his quotes and denied saying what he clearly did say to a Barrow Journal reporter.

Last week, Winder Mayor Chip Thompson joined that tabloid choir when he whined to another newspaper about a story in the Journal where we reported some recent city meetings were illegal because no public notice of the meetings was given in advance.

The mayor defended meetings by citing a court case that wasn’t on point and he slammed us as “tabloid” for “printing what they want to print.”

If a politician doesn’t like the message, he always wants to shoot the messenger.

But the mayor is wrong. The budget meetings held by the City of Winder were illegal and the court case he cited doesn’t apply. We stand by our position on that.

Under Georgia law, most gatherings of a public agency board or council have to be announced in advance with time and location. Those meetings also have to be open to the public unless there are some very specific circumstances.

Winder officials claim that they didn’t know a quorum of city council members would be at the meetings. The mayor said that he didn’t know so many city council members would show up and that the meetings were for him to meet with department heads.

Really?

City officials should have known in advance that a quorum of city council members would be present. The mayor invited the entire council to attend those meetings. And a notice of the meetings with a detailed schedule listing council members and their committee assignments and meeting times was sent to all council members 11 days in advance (see below).

On the list for most of the meetings were four out of seven council members, showing clearly that the city should have anticipated in advance that a quorum of council members would likely attend.

So the mayor should have anticipated a quorum and given notice to the public on that alone.

But here’s an even more important point: The council’s budget meetings were legally committee meetings; those committees were composed of city council members.

For 13 council committees, Mayor Thompson along with council members Charlie Eberhart, Frank Dunagan and Ridley Parrish, are listed as committee members. Other council members are listed for an additional 10 committees (and presumably the mayor would be in attendance as well.)

Under Georgia law, any committee created by the council, whether it’s a quorum of council members or not, has to be treated just like a regular government meeting. That means advance notice has to be given of those meetings. That wasn’t done in Winder.

That committees have to follow the law just as the full council does was confirmed last week by Georgia Press Association attorney David Hudson:

“A committee is considered just like a meeting of the full council for purposes of the open meetings law. See 50-14-1(a)(2),” Hudson said. “It requires prior notice and admission of the public unless an exception applies and the committee votes in public to meet in closed session pursuant to one of the applicable exceptions.”

So the fact is, Winder did violate Georgia’s Open Meetings Law by not announcing its scheduled committee meetings to the public in advance.

Of course, there’s more to this than just the mayor trying to play hide-and-seek from the press.

Last year, this newspaper brought a lot of attention to the dysfunctional budget process previously employed by the city. Essentially, the mayor and city manager had been crafting the city budget they wanted with little council input and virtually no public input. They would then present their budget to the full council for a rubber stamp; few, if any, questions were asked and the public was afforded little notice or time for comments.

This newspaper criticized that process last year and all manner of political hell broke loose. Citizens were irate about the city’s secretive budget games and turned out at Winder council meetings to say so.

Partly in backlash to the secretive budget process, Bob Dixon was elected last year to the city council after calling for greater city council transparency and involvement. The council is right to ask more questions.

But it’s not something the mayor or city manager apparently wanted; they no longer have total control over the city budget now that Dixon and other council members are poking around and (gasp!) asking questions in public.

Winder’s budget funds are not the mayor’s money; they are the taxpayers’ money. For the mayor to treat the budget as some sort of secretive conclave that one can attend only if he knows the secret handshake is silly.

In addition, budgets are the most important actions taken by any local government. No other action affects citizens as much as a government’s plan for spending: Where does the money go? How much are officials paying employees? What are the government’s priorities in spending?

All of those are questions taxpayers have a right to ask. They have a right to understand how those decisions are made. And they have the right to attend meetings and question government officials and to air their views about government spending priorities.

Heck, even the dysfunctional Barrow County Board of Commissioners has a more open budget process than the City of Winder — to its credit, the BOC gives public notice of its budget committee meetings.

While we understand why some misguided government officials may want to have a secretive budget, we were stunned that our media competitors down the street wrote a PR puff article for the city last week defending the secret budget meetings by claiming they were legal. They’re wrong.

As a member of the Fourth Estate, newspapers should be holding government officials accountable, not acting as lapdogs and making excuses for those in power when they screw up.

City council members who attended those recent meetings aren’t to blame for any of this; it wasn’t their job to do the notification. And in fact, we applaud those council members’ desire to become more involved directly in the city’s budget process.

But both the mayor and city manager know how the state’s open meetings law works. What are they trying to hide by not notifying the public? Why not try to be as open as possible with budget committee meetings?

This column probably won’t change their minds. And readers will have to judge for themselves whether this newspaper’s stand in pushing for more open government is correct or not.

Our credentials?

Well, we speak from years of experience. We’ve served on the Public Affairs Committee of the Georgia Press Association for over 25 years dealing with open government laws, and we have helped write some of the language in those laws. This discussion isn’t new to us and we have long championed more transparency and openness in our local governments by testifying a number of times before state House and Senate committees.

So we stand by our interpretation of the law that the recent City of Winder budget meetings were public meetings and that advance notice should have been given to the press and the public.

But the mayor was right about one thing: The Journal will continue to print the news without his holding our hands or telling us what to say. This newspaper is independent and will not be a mouthpiece for any government agency or official.

Mike Buffington is Co-Publisher of the Barrow Journal. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.