Every newly elected official in North Carolina is required to have two hours of ethics training within 12 months of being sworn into office. I asked Clerk Akers to sign me up for a class the NC League of Municipalities offered online and viewed the course on January 29, 2024. It was enlightening. I wish everyone interested enough in our local government to read this blog could view the entire two-hour presentation themselves.
One segment especially grabbed my attention. I’d heard many explanations over the years about the rules governing open meetings, and often those explanations changed depending on who I was talking to. Here’s what the experts had to say about virtual or online meetings.
I’ve published evidence here in the past few months – screenshots from former Mayor Caudle’s phone – that clearly show three of the other four sitting commissioners violating this prohibition on unannounced, online meetings outside the public’s view. I’ve reproduced a screenshot below. Notice then-Mayor Caudle practically begging the board members to stop using the ‘reply all’ function to avoid breaking the law, and them ignoring her completely, like they always did.
Click the image to go back and read the rest of its context, but clearly, these commissioners were violating the spirit if not the letter of our state’s open meetings law. None of them have any excuse for not knowing this, especially not those who have served longer than twelve months. This is not a new law, but there’s more.
Below are three images of an email exchange that also broke this ethics rule. We begin with an email I sent to Clerk Akers. Note that I sent it on a federal holiday and did not expect any response until the next morning at best.
The content of the message is irrelevant at this point. I was sending a communication about an upcoming meeting to the Town Clerk, a perfectly legal and reasonable thing for an elected official to do.
Next, we have the clerk’s response, about ten minutes later, forwarding my message to the entire board, as I had requested.
Again, perfectly legal and reasonable. Remarkable only because she responded so quickly during a federal holiday, the celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.
And then things went off the rails.
The timestamp on the email above indicates that Commissioner Brower sent her response a little before 2 p.m., roughly two hours after the clerk’s forwarded message. It seemed much quicker to my memory, but that’s not what’s important. What matters is the Commissioner’s use of the ‘reply all’ function in her response to me.
Commissioner Brower was elected in November of 2021 and would have been required to attend her ethics training within twelve months of taking her oath of office, which included a promise to uphold the laws of the State of North Carolina.
If I’ve already seen this much unethical behavior by these board members in less than three months on the board, how much have you and I not seen? We’ll never know because laws like this rarely have any teeth. Our legislature is rather infamous for writing laws governing the behavior of public officials without including any enforcement mechanisms. Unless an official, elected or appointed, gets caught committing financial crimes, there are seldom any real consequences to bad behavior like this.
I will not risk my reputation by any further association with these individuals. This is my resignation letter.
I quit.