There are decades of public official experience between the three Madison County commissioners: John Richwine, Paul Wilson and Pat Dillon.
Even a cursory reading of Indiana’s open meeting act clearly states that a public body can’t gather to receive information without deeming it a public meeting and giving 48 hours notice.
That notice didn’t happen prior to Monday’s meeting of the Killbuck Concerned Citizens Association. The group invited the commissioners to comment on the languishing proposal to build the Mallard Lake landfill in Richland Township.
At the Monday meeting, every elected county commissioner sat together and discussed a very hot public topic. True, the issue isn’t formally before the Board of Commissioners, but history shows that this issue simply won’t die.
It’s quite possible this issue will come before the commissioners again. To be safe, commissioners should have treated their gathering as a public meeting.
To us, the most damning evidence that the meeting likely violated the open meeting law was a photo in The Herald Bulletin Tuesday that shows the three sitting in a row at a table, passing a microphone back and forth.
If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s likely a duck.
In this case, the duck is an official meeting of the Madison County Board of Commissioners.
State law states that a meeting “means a gathering of a majority of the governing body of a public agency for the purpose of taking official action upon public business. Such purposes include receiving information.
Commissioners, you should have known better.
It is vital that elected officials discuss the public’s business in public, with ample notice so the public can attend if they so choose.
There are few ramifications of the commissioners’ meeting because no official action was taken. But commissioners likely will have to repeat at a properly noticed meeting their comments made Monday. It’s difficult to recreate a past event, though.
We know residents were eager to hear the commissioners’ views of the 29-year battle between residents and those intending to build a landfill near Killbuck School. We were interested in their comments, too, given that they decided to remain mum through much of the nearly three decades of debate. Their frustrating silence was at the advice of their attorneys while lawsuits were pending. Now that those restraints are lifted, the conversation could be had.
But the public should have had proper notice that such utterances were to be, well, uttered in a public place by public officials on a topic of utmost interest to the public.
Perhaps an apology is in order from those commissioners to the public.
All the public asks is that it is invited to your meetings. All of them.
We believe: The county commissioners goofed when they held an illegal meeting Monday.
Opinion
Commissioners should know better
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