A legal communication from The Alamance News was one of the topics that the county’s board of commissioners mulled over when they convened a closed-door discussion at the end of an otherwise public meeting on Monday.
This hour-and-a-half long conclave had originally appeared on the meeting agenda for Monday’s regularly-scheduled meeting when its contents were released to the public last Wednesday.
The agenda itself omitted any particulars about the purpose of that evening’s closed session. Even so, Alamance County’s attorney Rik Stevens spelled out each of the proposed discussion topics immediately before the conclave began – as legally required for any closed session that takes place under the auspices of North Carolina’s Open Meetings Law.
According to the county attorney, the board would go behind closed doors to discuss the qualifications or fitness of a current or prospective county employee or officer as well as the terms of an employment contract for either a current or prospective staff member. In addition, Stevens urged the board hold privileged attorney-client discussion, whose subject he later divulged as a legal demand letter that county officials had recently received from a law firm that represents The Alamance News.
The letter mentioned in Stevens’ motion had been dispatched by the firm of Stevens, Martin, Vaughn & Tadych earlier that day in regard to the county attorney’s response to a newspaper article about a call that the county’s 9-1-1 center had received from a young woman who died during Tropical Storm Chantal.
In response to requests from the newspaper, Stevens had provided a transcript of the emotionally-charged phone call which 23-year-old Hajar Hassib had placed as her car was swallowed up by fast-rising floodwaters on the night of the storm. Her desperate pleas elicited repeated assurances from the county’s emergency dispatcher that help would be on the way. The call cut out, however, as Hassib lamented her increasingly bleak predicament. The promised assistance never arrived, and it wasn’t until two days later that Hassib’s body was recovered after her family filed a missing person report with the municipal police department in Graham.
Although Stevens had been scrupulously prompt and forthcoming to the newspaper’s inquiries about the phone call, his amicable tenor underwent a complete shift when the article appeared the next day.
That morning, the county attorney emailed the newspaper to cancel the legal department’s subscription, and he notified its publisher that his department would no longer run statutorily-mandated legal notices in The Alamance News. Stevens went on to attribute this sudden move, in part, to the newspaper’s decision to print the 9-1-1 caller’s “dying words,” and he further stressed his resolve not “to support unempathetic journalism” in his capacity as county attorney.
Stevens spurned a subsequent invitation from the newspaper’s publisher to discuss his concerns about the newspaper’s coverage. In the meantime, the county attorney turned to another area newspaper to run a required legal notice about a land swap with a private developer that the board of commissioners formally accepted during their regularly-scheduled meeting on Monday.
On the afternoon before Monday’s meeting, attorneys Michael J. Tadych and Ashley N. Fox emailed each of the county commissioners about Stevens’ decision to withhold the legal department’s patronage in retaliation for the newspaper’s coverage.
The newspaper’s attorneys argued that the county attorney had misused his authority to abrogate the newspaper’s First Amendment rights as well as the press freedom enshrined in North Carolina’s state constitution. Tadych and Fox added that Stevens’ own emails made it quite clear that he intended “to punish the newspaper for its coverage of Ms. Hassib’s frantic call” to the county’s 9-1-1 center.
“Retaliation of this sort in response to protected speech is plainly unconstitutional,” the newspaper’s attorneys went on to assert. “It appears that the county attorney has taken his own, personal, pique over the paper’s article and used the club and imprimatur of Alamance County’s government policy in a retaliatory attempt to harm and punish The Alamance News.
The board of commissioners ultimately spent about an hour and a half in closed session on Monday to discuss the various items which Stevens had laid out in his motion.
It’s unclear just how much time its members allotted to each of the three items under consideration, or the order in which they had addressed the three topics in the closed session motion. Even so, they ordered both Stevens and the county clerk to leave the room for the final leg of their conversation. The board then returned to open session with no further remarks or announcements before they adjourned.
