Yesterday Jason Glodt and Marsy’s Law—today Aberdeen gets the three-play: city, school, now county commission!
The Brown County Commission is evidently so sick of hearing folks slag IT director Paul Sivertsen’s questionable work and pay on county time that it has vowed to close the doors anytime any citizen comes to a commission meeting and starts discussing county personnel.
Here’s the executive-session order, issued by the Brown County Commission yesterday:
Effective immediately, BC Commission meetings will no longer provide a public forum to attack, condemn or accuse any BC employee. If a concerned citizen has a personnel related issue, that issue will be discussed in Executive Session and dealt with appropriately in open session when and if action is required. There should be a reasonable expectation by every BC employee that they should be able to report to work and do their job without fear of being publically chastised in an open meeting. BC will handle all personnel issues this way in the future. It is the responsibility of the BC Commission to listen to legitimate criticism of County Policy while at the same time protecting our employees [Brown County Commission, “Response to Employee Grievance,” 2015.10.27].
Hmmm… the Brown County Commission has heard citizens legitimately criticize County Policy on online fair ticket sales and reporting, information security, and financial oversight. Sivertsen himself appears to have crafted some County Policy, like the policy that the county would allow one employee to route citizens’ financial information through his own private business server. But since the County chooses to interpret criticism of those County Policies as criticism of a County Employee, the County will now keep those criticisms off the record.
One of the core complaints against Sivertsen is that he is a beneficiary of cronyism. That complaint is not so much a complaint about Sivertsen himself as it is a complaint about the Commission and its hiring practices. Is the Brown County Commission now excluding any warnings about cronyism from the public at its meetings?
SDCL 1-25-2 allows public bodies to go into executive session and stop taking minutes for, among other things, “discussing the qualifications, competence, performance, character or fitness of any public officer or employee or prospective public officer or employee.” That all-too-oft-cited exemption from open government only applies to public board members (and even there, more weakly and unenforceably than most people think). SDCL 1-25-2 allows the Brown County Commission to switch off the camera and kick out the public during a meeting.
But SDCL 1-25-2 does not gag citizens. Citizens may chastise public employees any time they want. Citizens should keep those criticisms legitimate—malicious lies about public employees can still draw defamation charges—but the fact that the Brown County Commission will only hear such criticisms behind closed doors doesn’t stop aggrieved citizens from stating their grievances to the press or online the moment they step out from behind those closed doors. Hearing those grievances, especially when they touch on cronyism, is important for the public to understand the fairness and effectiveness of its own government.
Regarding the executive session order, what does it mean to “delete a meeting”? Does i5 mean deleted from the minutes” That statement is the most blatant example of dissembling one can find in the record of government business. Instead of providing answers, it tells the public to go look the information up for themselves. It would be good to know exactly what a legislative audit entails and exactly what its report says.
Mr. H, you should roast a few of these people in bloggings when they mess up. This commission cannot legislate to you what you can blog about.
Circling the wagons as Brown County circles the drain? It never ceases to amaze me how public employees think their acts or omissions are free from public review. Try being a public colonel, general, or judge and see how far that pretend exemption from scrutiny flies. If it can’t pass the CNN-test of ‘film at 6’ test then it likely stinks. Grow up and get over it. If one is unable to be forthright; then move on to private sector job where one may connive in private.
Can Brown Co supervisors stop John Q Public from posting op-eds in the paper or on Facebook,Twitter,etc? Maybe employees can have their names trademarked so no one can use them w/o paying royalties. That’ll fix them darn public peoples.
Mike, of course not. As a long-time public employee, I know full well that my salary and my performance are matters of public interest.
David, part of the complaints the Commission has received include the dubious allegation that someone deleted Matt Dielke’s presentation on Sivertsen’s failures from the official video of that September meeting.
Open meeting laws need to be better defined and toughened. Teeth and transparency. Executive sessions are greatly overused and misused. The “system” needs an 800 number complaint and review system. Local states attorneys are mostly worthless when it comes to enforcing open meeting laws.