The most notable thing about the Hancock County Council’s secret, false-start vote on the jail tax back in July isn’t the declaration last week by the state’s public access counselor that it was illegal.
It isn’t even the strong language the state’s arbiter, Luke Britt, used in criticizing the council for illegally gaveling in a special meeting during one of its committee meetings.
It’s that, for all the sound legal reasoning and calls for transparency, the county council will continue operating pretty much as it does now, with a couple of minor tweaks to satisfy the letter — if not the spirit — of the Indiana Open Door Law.
In case you missed it, Britt issued an opinion late last week in which he found that the council had violated the Open Door Law when it interrupted a meeting of its budget committee on July 1 to convene the council for a vote on raising the local income tax. Conveniently, all the members of the council are also on the budget committee, so why not take care of business while everyone is present?
The problem, Britt noted, is that the public must be told about public meetings 48 hours in advance, and the meeting-within-a-meeting convened by the council president, Bill Bolander, didn’t come close to satisfying that basic standard.
“Plainly enough, that violates the Open Door Law,” Britt wrote in response to a formal complaint filed by the Daily Reporter. “A council cannot simply gavel in to a committee meeting and slip an ordinance through without notice.”
For the record, Bolander told the Daily Reporter’s Ben Middelkamp this week that he still thinks the meeting was appropriate. Unlike Britt, he makes no distinction between the council and its committee.
The council did decide to make a couple of changes. For one thing — and to its credit — the council no longer will hold its budget committee meetings in the basement of the jail, a hard-to-access area that discourages public attendance. (In fact, members of the public hardly ever attend budget meetings, although they are open to the public.) All committee meetings now will be in the Commissioners Court at the courthouse annex, where it holds its regular monthly meetings.
But, more importantly, all meetings of the budget committee — long, tedious sessions during which council members pore over the books but at which no final votes can be taken — will also be meetings of the full council. They’ll be advertised as separate meetings to satisfy the letter of the law, and the council will be free to convene an impromptu meeting whenever it wants. (The Daily Reporter is seeking clarification from Britt on the legality of this approach.)
The county council — at least its leaders — already have shown a disdain for transparency. It’s not hard to imagine this happening again the next time a controversial matter comes up and the council doesn’t want an audience.
This is a poor way to govern, and it bakes confusion into the council’s activities. It’s also a perversion of the legislature’s intent with the Open Door Law, and it does grave damage to the public trust.
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