| Jim Condos is rapidly becoming my all-time favorite elected official.
Last year he toured the state, patiently explaining in town after village, the purpose and process of open meetings. Having attended one of those tutorials in the Town of St. Albans I can tell you that he was nothing if not thorough.
The purview of the Secretary of State may not be very sexy, having to do, primarily, with the minutia of law; but as I have learned through painful experience, corruption of the local process is at the very heart of many of the problems we later spend years (and fortunes) trying to sort out.
The excessively liberal use of Executive Session has long been a debatable issue here in Franklin County. Minutes from meetings are typically punctuated with cryptic moves to Executive Session, citing only the statute under which the presumptive move is being made.
Little attempt is made to identify what is the actual business of the Executive Session beyond what is revealed in a resulting decision.
I recently obtained the minutes of a City Council meeting which immediately commenced with one of those broadly-based statutory motions into Executive Session. Return to open session was soon followed with a second Executive Session; so that the reader was at a complete loss as to the rationale or responsibility for decisions that emerged from the meeting.
Exactly whose interests are those obfuscations protecting? Certainly not those of the citizens.
Finally, it seems that the culture of opacity in our local decision-making process has gone too far .
Secy. Condos has called-out the School Board for BFA-St. Albans and the Northwest Technical Center on their failure to keep a proper record of events that transpired at a January 3 meeting, when a high-profile incident of rules violations was under consideration for disciplinary action.
Responding to a Free Press query:
Condos... wrote (that) the district had failed to give a true indication of what happened at a Jan. 3 meeting and a motion to go into secret session that night was worded improperly.
The Free Press inquiry was based on lacking minutes when the board was considering discipline against a teacher and a student for a deer hunting incident on school time.
I have absolutely no connection to the school or to anyone involved, and wouldn't even speculate on whether the decision the Board reached was appropriate; but I will certainly bear in mind the School Board's lack of transparency the next time I step up to the ballot box.
No doubt Secretary Condos' name will frequently be taken in vain this weekend here and there around St. Albans, where boards and councils rarely face challenges when they do things 'their way.'
This is just to say that there remain many St. Albans residents who congratulate you, Secretary Condos, for a job well-done. |
