State responds to open meeting law complaint against school board

The Douglas County School Board has "cured" the allegation of an open meeting law violation filed in June by The Record-Courier, according to Nevada Senior Deputy Attorney General George Taylor.

"We agree with the board of school trustees that it has effectively cured the open meeting law allegation of violations contained in your complaint," Taylor wrote in an Oct. 13 letter to The R-C.

On Tuesday, Board President Cindy Trigg said she had not received any formal notice of being in violation of the open meeting law.

"I'm assuming it's cured," she said. "If I did something wrong, it was not on purpose, but to enhance the process and make it more transparent."

On June 19, two days after Superintendent Carol Lark's evaluation, The R-C filed an open meeting law complaint with the state attorney general's office. The R-C was concerned about a private meeting school board officers Cindy Trigg, Tom Moore and Keith Roman held June 13 to compile the evaluation materials. The meeting was not agendized nor held in public. In its complaint, The R-C said the action constituted a subcommittee and was therefore subject to the open meeting law.

Another issue was that written statements of individual board members regarding Lark's performance and two petitions signed by district employees, requesting Lark's contract not be extended, were not provided to the public at the June 17 meeting.

Trigg defended her decision to meet with board officers on June 13.

"My biggest complaint is that my reason for having the officers wasn't relayed to the attorney general's office," she said. "We were having problems with a fractured board. We were having issues, and I did it in the interest of being transparent."

Trigg said under such contentious conditions, there was no way she was going to compile the evaluation materials herself. She said that would have created more controversy.

"For me to do it myself would have sent a bad message," she said. "The officers agreed. If that was a mistake, then I take full responsibility, but I'd rather have a violation than the perception that I didn't do things honestly."

Trigg said in her personal opinion, the officers' private meeting did not constitute a violation. She said she and Moore already had strong differences in opinion about Lark and that the meeting was a "very generic process," during which they compiled the evaluation summary.

"If it ends up being a violation, I am willing to accept that and say it was worth it, because the bigger issue was someone questioning the integrity of it," Trigg said.

As for the employee petitions, Trigg said they were provided as regular correspondence to board members and available to the public at their June 9 meeting, although The R-C put in a formal request for them in June and didn't receive them until August.

"Our attorneys are the ones who didn't give the petitions and failed to mention they were already out in the public," Trigg said.

To clear the allegations, though not admitting any violation took place, the board officers met again in public before their Aug. 11 meeting. Lark's evaluation had been continued to that date, and the officers used the agendized pre-meeting to formally approve the evaluation materials and the compilation of a numeric performance summary. Also made public were the written comments of board members and the aforementioned employee petitions.

"The board of school trustees, during its regular board meeting, having the newly approved officer summary in hand, considered an agenda item to 're-vote' their evaluation of the Superintendent that had been previously approved on June 17, 2009, apparently in an effort to ensure that the vote on June 17, 2009 could not be challenged as an open meeting law violation," Taylor wrote in his letter.

However, although corrective action was taken, the question remains if the school board actually violated the open meeting law, something not explicitly stated in Taylor's letter. On Wednesday, Taylor said he could not comment further on the issue.

"This office urges public bodies to 'cure' a violation through use of several methods suggested in the attorney general's manual," Taylor wrote in the letter to The R-C. "The manual plainly states that a 'cure' does not obliterate a violation, but is instead 'corrective action' which allows the public body to proceed with the public's business in the open."

R-C Editor Kurt Hildebrand, who filed the original complaint, questioned the attorney general's statement.

"If it wasn't a violation, why did they take a do-over?" Hildebrand said. "I find the attorney general office's opinion lacking in that it does not come to the direct conclusion that there was a violation of the open meeting law. Until the attorney general's office is willing to state outright whether there is a violation or not, how can public bodies know if they are violating the law?"

Barry Smith, executive director of the Nevada Press Association, agreed.

"From what I know of it, it seems like a clear violation of the open meeting law," Smith said on Wednesday. "While it's good to take corrective action, by going back and re-voting and making it official, it doesn't excuse them from violating the open meeting law in the first place."