We were disappointed by the initial decision of Alamance County Republican Party chairman Kathy Page to plan for a secretive gathering of the party’s executive committee this Saturday morning to select the next county commissioner.
County commissioner Craig Turner, a Republican member of the board, was elected to a district court judgeship on November 5. He submitted his resignation from the board of commissioners yesterday.
So the executive committee of the Republican Party has scheduled a meeting to select a replacement to serve the remaining two years of his term. Under North Carolina law, Alamance County is one of 42 counties where the recommendation of the party of the departing member must be appointed to the board by the remaining members of the commissioner board.
In her announcement of the meeting last week, scheduled for Saturday at 9:00 a.m. at party headquarter, Page wrote: “Attendance at this meeting will be limited to Alamance County GOP Executive Committee members and candidates for the vacancy…”
First, an acknowledgement about chairman Page. She is a very well-versed partisan, with much experience in many aspects of local, even regional, politics. As best we can tell, she has done an excellent job in managing a sometimes fractious group of county Republicans, who sometimes express many often conflicting interests – and, quite frankly don’t always sound, or behave, like Republicans, either at all or toward one another.
But her desire to meet behind closed doors on this occasion is very much misplaced – and serves neither her party nor Alamance County’s public well at all. It is also, to the best of our memory, unprecedented.
When Craig Turner was chosen in early 2021 to fill the remaining two years of former county commissioner Amy Galey’s term (Galey having been elected in the 2020 elections to the state senate), the meeting was open, albeit via an online Zoom meeting (during the pandemic).
And, Galey herself, had been put forward by the party in 2016 as replacement to be on the ballot that fall on the board of commissioners when then-county commissioner Dan Ingle, another Republican, resigned. The party appointed Roger Parker to fill the seven months remaining in Ingle’s term, but Galey to be on the ballot to finish the remaining two years of his term.
Both of those meetings, in 2016 and 2021, were open to the public, press, and all Republicans.
Turner at the time of his 2021 appointment was a vice chairman of the local party, and as such was a member of the executive committee, and he won the nod of his fellow executive committee members on a first ballot, having captured a majority (22 of 39) of the executive committee members who participated that night.
Why the party needs a closed-door gathering to select Turner’s replacement makes no sense to us. Or as the old philosopher from Carthage used to say, “It doesn’t even make good nonsense.”
In a conversation with this newspaper’s publisher, Tom Boney, Jr., yesterday, we have urged her to reverse course and change her procedure to allow, instead, an open meeting – in which the public generally, and other Republicans, in particular, can hear and view the proceedings.
But as we stressed to Page, in addition to our general view that the public, and even the Republican Party, is better served by a open process, we also believe that state law requires that this particular meeting be open.
There are currently four other Republican members of the Alamance County board of commissioners. As such, they’re all members of the executive committee (generally defined as those who are Republican office holders, precinct chairmen, or other party officials).
But if three or four of them gather Saturday morning, they also constitute a quorum of the board of county commissioners. As such, their gathering to transact the public’s business – i.e., the selection of their fifth colleague – constitutes an “official meeting,” in our judgment of the board of commissioners.
In a letter to both Page and county commissioner chairman John Paisley, Jr., this newspaper’s publisher has warned about proceeding with Page’s intention to conduct the meeting to select a new commissioner secretly as both a bad public policy position for the party, but, more importantly, a violation of the state’s Open Meetings Law.
State law, Boney noted in his letter, is defined as “a meeting, assembly, or gathering together at any time or place or the simultaneous communication by conference telephone or other electronic means of a majority of the members of a public body for the purpose of conducting hearings, participating in deliberations, or voting upon or otherwise transacting the public business within the jurisdiction, real or apparent, of the public body.” [emphasis added]
This interpretation is supported by attorneys with the North Carolina Press Association.
The very purpose of the meeting, as Page noted in her announcement, is to select a new commissioner. As such that is the very essence of “transacting the public business.”
Now, commissioners have often gathered together in groups for social gatherings. The statute is clear, however, that while social gatherings are allowed, “a social meeting or other informal assembly or gathering together of the members of a public body does not constitute an official meeting unless called or held to evade the spirit and purposes of this Article.”
We’ve highlighted to county commissioner chairman Paisley that Republican commissioners gathering together to help select their fifth member would be precisely the kind of action that evades the spirit and purposes of the Open Meetings Law.
Now, Page has gotten an opinion from her party’s top lawyer in Raleigh claiming that the Republican members of the party, including all members of the board of commissioners, can, in fact, meet together privately, as she had proposed.
Surprise, surprise.
But we think his assessment is deeply flawed.
And the consequences for that error are serious.
One of the remedies provided among the provisions in the Open Meetings Law is that, if challenged, an action taken during an illegal meeting can be declared by a judge to be null and void.
So, if the executive committee continues with its chairman’s plan to have a closed-door meeting, it is entirely possible that when a court finds the commissioners to have violated the law by being present together to transact public business, the action naming a successor to Turner can be declared null and void.
Then the executive committee also runs the risk that it will lose the ability to name Turner’s successor at all, inasmuch as state law only allows the party to make such a determination if it does so within 30 days of the vacancy, which occurred yesterday.
But if time runs out during the course of a legal challenge to the process, the Republican Party may end up without the ability to name, or even influence, who the remaining county commissioner board members will select.
Now, we’ve heard via the grapevine, that party officials are trying to pressure two of the four commissioners not to attend Saturday’s meeting, thereby skirting the quorum which would, otherwise undoubtedly, make their gathering an official meeting, under state law.
We don’t think that is a wise alternative, and it still leaves the public and other Republicans very much in the dark, but at least it might not be as overt a violation of state law.
We very much hope other Republicans – members of the executive committee and other “regular” Republicans – will urge Page to reverse course and allow an open election process.
We don’t have a dog in the fight of who the party elects to be the new commissioner, we just want the process to be open, as it has been in the past – and as it should be under state law when filling a county commissioner’s seat.
