On Deaf Ears

In recent weeks, The Southampton Press, in articles, editorials and on the 27Speaks podcast, has hammered away on the importance of transparency in government and how the Southampton Village Board of Trustees needs to be less opaque.

The principal problem is the board members’ tendency to hold discussions in private meetings — such as executive sessions or consultations with counsel — that the Open Meetings Law requires them to have in public.

On April 13, the Board of Trustees unanimously approved mandatory Open Meetings Law training annually for all members of the board itself, as well as the village land-use boards, which was an important step, but the message, apparently, still hasn’t gotten through.

The Board of Trustees had a spirited discussion on April 25 over Mayor Jesse Warren’s proposal that the board members vote to cancel — for themselves and for future members — the health insurance for life, upon turning 55, that the village extends to former mayors and trustees who served the village for a minimum of five years. The trustees objected to the mayor putting the matter on the agenda for the first time as both a discussion item and a suggested resolution on the same night. Rightly so, they called for more discussion and information and to wait for the pending recommendations from two village committees exploring Village Board compensation before voting, and for public input.

“We should take public input, we should consider all these factors before we make a decision in the spur of the moment,” Trustee Roy Stevenson said at the meeting.

But where Stevenson went wrong was asking for that discussion to take place over email among board members before the matter is aired at a public board meeting. He suggested this as a best practice that the mayor should have employed not just for this matter, but for all the other times in recent months that the mayor asked the village attorney to draft a resolution before gauging whether a proposal would gain any traction.

“All it takes is an email to everybody saying, ‘Hey, would you support this if I put this on the agenda this week?’ We can say yes or no. You can say, ‘Why don’t you?’ ‘I’d like to see it changed this way’ or whatever. There’s a little bit of give and take. There’s some communication. There’s not, kind of, ‘do it or else,’ and we end at this conflict where it appears all we are is at odds.”

Stevenson accused the mayor of a “complete lack of consultation with the board to determine whether or not they would support such resolutions.” But that consultation and “give and take” he desires is not supposed to happen behind the scenes.

The legislation declaration of the Open Meetings Law states it plainly: “It is essential to the maintenance of a democratic society that the public business be performed in an open and public manner and that the citizens of this state be fully aware of and able to observe the performance of public officials and attend and listen to the deliberations and decisions that go into the making of public policy.”

Paul Wolf, the president of the nonprofit New York Coalition for Open Government, said this week that the Open Meeting Law is intended to provide the public with the right to observe the performance of public officials in their deliberations. “That intent cannot be realized if members of a public body conduct public business as a body or vote by phone, by mail, or by email,” he said.

Strictly speaking, the New York State Committee on Open Government, a state agency, does not consider email communications to be meetings in violation of Open Meetings Law because “there is no instantaneous or contemporaneous exchange” over email — based on the assumption that a majority of board members are not reading and responding to an email chain simultaneously, the way they would via a voice conference or text messaging.

Still, there is the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. The letter may not define an email chain as a virtual meeting that constitutes a violation of the law, but intentionally using an email chain to deliberate and disagree, negotiate and strike deals, and vote before formally voting — all out of the public’s earshot — certainly violates the spirit of the law.

Whether to cancel village taxpayer-funded health insurance outright for future former board members is an issue that merits lengthy examination and debate. There is a lot to consider, and it is far from the simple matter the mayor makes it out to be. But none of those deliberations should be happening via email. When elected representatives disagree on proposals, it’s not supposed to be a secret, and the process of finding common ground should occur in a room that the taxpayers have been invited to.