Action unclear after closed session

WASHINGTON — After roughly 45 minutes waiting out a closed session to discuss imminent or current litigation Tuesday morning, members of the public filed back into the Washington County Board of Supervisors office, where Supervisor Stan Stoops made a motion “to direct counsel, as directed in closed session.”

Stoops declined to clarify the motion’s intent when asked during the meeting, saying legal counsel had instructed him not to.

“That’s all we were directed to say,” he said.

The topic of the meeting was not stated on the agenda, but third party legal consultants from the firm Hopkins and Hubner were in the room for the closed session, a firm the county hired several months ago to navigate issues at the ambulance service. The last time it sent representatives to a closed session for litigation matters, the meeting ended in a paid suspension for the ambulance department’s then-director, Jeremy Peck.

State law requires that virtually all government motions and votes be made in public sessions, but does not spell out transparency requirements for those motions. Iowa Freedom of Information Council Executive Director Randy Evans said the matter was a legal gray area.

“The open meetings law, it doesn’t provide a lot of black and white guidance, generally,” Evans said. “Final action can’t be taken in the closed session, it needs to be taken in public. Nothing in the law prevents the Washington County Supervisors from being more transparent on what it is that the supervisors voted on today.”

While Iowa code doesn’t explicitly call for it, Evans said such precision was the norm, but that exceptions tended to involve personnel matters.

“If some employee’s evaluation is being conducted, the law would allow that discussion to occur in private, but sooner or later, I think the law’s purpose would be such that … they need to fill in the public on what occurred,” he said. “You would not want the employee to be informed in a public meeting that their job has been eliminated … you would want to have that occur in a private, one-on-one meeting.”

Evans said it wasn’t unheard of for decision-makers to make a call, and disclose details down the road.

“If you look around Iowa on these kinds of issues, you will see times where the action or the motion that is made after a closed session is annoyingly cryptic,” he said. “The norm, from my years of following these kinds of issues, would be (that) when the action is carried out, the public is made aware then … as opposed to, ‘We don’t contemplate answering any questions about this.’ To me, that is out of the ordinary.”

The Washington County Auditor’s and Attorney’s offices did not immediately reply to public record requests related to Tuesday morning’s motion.

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com