The Espanola School Board violated the state Open Meetings Act by improperly advertising a closed-door meeting earlier this year, according to the state Attorney General’s Office.
State law requires the Board to specify what it will discuss before it goes into closed session. The Board failed to do that when it met in private Feb. 27 to screen superintendent applicants but listed only unspecified “limited personnel matters” on its meeting agenda.
Tony Ortiz, the Board’s lawyer, acknowledged that agenda was not specific enough in his response to a complaint the SUN filed with the Office after the meeting, according to a June 16 letter from Assistant Attorney General Andrea Buzzard.
While the Act calls for penalties of up to $500 for open meetings violations, Buzzard instead determined the Board had resolved the violation by later publishing revised meeting minutes “to accurately reflect the nature of the ‘personnel matters’ that the Board discussed during its closed meeting on that date.”
“We consider the matter closed and trust that in the future the Board will take care to ensure that its agenda listing of items meet (the Act’s) specificity requirement,” Buzzard wrote.
The Office has not yet responded to a separate complaint the SUN filed in mid-February regarding violations during a closed meeting the Board held Nov. 1, 2008, at the offices of a Santa Fe law firm.
The agenda for that meeting that the Board gave the public stated only that it planned to discuss real estate and then-superintendent David Cockerham’s evaluation. Once behind closed doors, the Board followed a separate agenda with items that by law must be discussed publicly, including plans for holding a bond election this fall and opening a new ninth-grade academy.