Constitutional Law

Ore. judge: 2 county officials violated open-meetings law

By By The Associated Press

EUGENE, Ore. ? A judge has ruled that two Lane County commissioners violated Oregon?s public-meetings law in 2009 and are personally liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses in the case.

Commissioner Rob Handy lined up votes to approve personal assistants for commissioners and worked with Commissioner Pete Sorenson in advance to script a vote, making the resulting public process a "sham," Coos County Circuit Judge Michael Gillespie wrote in a 44-page opinion.

"It was orchestrated down to the timing and manner of the vote so as to avoid any public discussion," Gillespie wrote.

Handy and Sorenson defended their actions and their commitment to open government, The Register-Guard reported.

"We will be looking (today) and in the future at whether we will appeal this," Handy said, during a news conference Jan. 18 with Sorenson at the county Public Service Building in Eugene. "My personal feeling is that we should."

Former Lane County Commissioner Eleanor "Ellie" Dumdi and retired Eugene businessman Ed Anderson filed the lawsuit. Eugene's Seneca-Jones Timber Co. was also involved in filing the complaint, according to court documents and records.

Gillespie handed down his ruling on Jan. 18 after hearing three days of testimony in December and reviewing evidence in the lawsuit accusing the board of commissioners as a whole and Handy, Sorenson and former commissioner Bill Fleenor individually of flouting Oregon law requiring public bodies to deliberate and make decisions in public.

Gillespie, who heard the case to avoid any appearance of bias by a Lane County judge, also found the board as a whole broke the law before and during the Dec. 9, 2009, vote.

But he dismissed Fleenor as an individual defendant in the case, saying there was no evidence the former Lane County commissioner participated in nonpublic discussions of the matter.

Gillespie did fault two board members not named in the suit, saying they participated in a series of discussions Handy led before the public meeting to make "sure he had the votes lined up" and to orchestrate the way the vote would unfold with a minimum of public discussion.

The primary participants were Handy and Sorenson, the judge wrote, but Commissioner Bill Dwyer and Commissioner Faye Stewart also participated in violating the law.

Gillespie said he reached that conclusion even though "the evidence did not show that any three commissioners were ever in the same room at the same time talking about this matter."

At the news conference, Handy and Sorenson defended themselves partly by characterizing their actions as legal, "one-on-one" conversations that never constituted a quorum.

But the judge wrote that the absence of a physical quorum of a board majority did not mean they were not deliberating.

"All involved knew that a quorum of the board was working toward a final decision outside the public meeting context," the judge wrote.

Full post as published by First Amendment Center on January 19, 2011 (boomark / email).