Boardman trustees insult voters with closed meetings

Boardman trustees insult voters with closed meetings

Once again, Boardman trustees have found themselves incapable of discussing the public’s business in front of the public. This time the issue was the decision to place a 2 -mill levy on the ballot, which would cost Boardman taxpayers about $2 million a year.

Oh, the trustees say they went behind closed doors to discuss “personnel” and “pending or imminent litigation.” But that’s a transparent ruse to get around the state’s open meetings law. When they reconvened in public more than a hour after the last resident left the building, they voted to place the levy on the ballot.

If the trustees had to talk about personnel issues before they could vote on the levy, then what they were really discussing was the need for a levy. And isn’t a levy just the kind of thing that should be discussed in front of the people who will be paying for the levy — the people the trustees sent home?

When members of the Ohio General Assembly passed Open Meetings legislation in 1975, they did two things that are of particular note regarding the Boardman action. They made this the very first sentence of the law: “This section shall be liberally construed to require public officials to take official action and to conduct all deliberations upon official business only in open meetings unless the subject matter is specifically excepted by law.”

They listed several exceptions that the Legislature felt merited private discussion. Notably, regarding personnel, the language of the act consistently refers to action the board might take regarding “a public employee.” None of the language suggests that the Legislature was encouraging closed sessions for general discussion of large groups of public employees — such as all of the township’s safety forces.

What wasn’t exempted

And while the legislators carefully defined those topics of discussion that they thought warranted discussion behind closed doors, they did not mention tax levies. Surely the legislators knew that townships, school boards and city councils had occasion to discuss the possibility of placing a levy on the ballot. If lawmakers had intended for those discussions to be conducted in secret, they could have provided the exception.

Ohio’s Sunshine Law is written in layman’s terms; it doesn’t take a law degree to see its intent. How could this board of trustees — which includes a lawyer — read the clear language of this law and decide that it was OK to throw the public out and discuss general personnel issues that would determine whether a levy should be put on the ballot?

Frankly, they couldn’t. They chose to be clever, to find a tortured way to twist the law to their own ends — even though the law says it shall be liberally construed toward openness.

Boardman Township voters should ask themselves why they should trust this board’s judgment when the board doesn’t trust the voters to witness the governing process. Trustees have made it much easier for those who are inclined to keep their money to just vote “no” in November, and they’ve given impartial supporters of the tax reason to rethink their vote.