The Charlotte Observer has sued Union County for the release of closed-session recordings, minutes and general accounts from summer 2007, before the commissioners adopted a policy on who gets sewer capacity and how much they get. The newspaper also seeks records of closed meetings before and after county manager Mike Shalati's January 2007 firing. His attorney has said the firing was related to the county's water and sewer shortages.
Attorneys for the county say they aren't opposed to the court reviewing minutes and general accounts, but are fighting to keep a judge from reviewing audio recordings on which those documents are based. The county denies wrongdoing.
In a two-day hearing that ended Wednesday, Superior Court Judge David Lee said he would review the minutes of the summer meetings first. Then, if necessary, he said would review about 10 hours of audio recordings of those meetings. He did not say whether he would do the same for the meetings involving Shalati's firing.
A ruling on exactly how the court will proceed could come as early as next week.
If the documents show the commissioners' discussions covered more than personnel and attorney-client privilege -- two exceptions to the Open Meetings Law the county cited -- then the records could become public.
Those documents could shed light on how the five-member Board of Commissioners formed the sewer policy. Sewer allocation is controversial in Union County because capacity has not kept up with growth. Union is the seventh-fastest-growing county in the nation. The county announced in 2007 it had run out of sewer capacity.
On Sept. 13, commissioner Roger Lane walked out of a closed session. He testified Monday that the board discussed public policy, which would violate the Open Meetings Law. He has said the discussion covered issues such as the priority the policy would give to commercial and residential development.
On Sept. 17, the board adopted the policy 3-2 (commissioners Lane and Lanny Openshaw dissented) with almost no public discussion. The new policy means many developers won't get all the sewer hook-ups they want; others won't get any at all.
The preceding winter, the board fired Shalati, giving little reason. He has sued the board's majority seeking more than $600,000 in severance pay plus benefits. At a recent hearing in that case -- in which the Observer has intervened to obtain deposition transcripts -- Shalati's attorney said closed-session minutes from that time "may shed significant light on what the commissioners knew of the sewer-water situation."
In a brief filed Monday, Observer attorney Jon Buchan wrote that the N.C. Public Records Law requires closed-meeting records be made public "as soon as the reason for keeping the secret ceases to exist." Since the sewer policy has been adopted, there's no reason to keep the records from public view, the Observer argues.
On Wednesday, Union County Public Works director Christie Putnam testified that one developer has sued the county over the policy and several others have threatened to do the same. The county's attorney, Ligon Bundy, argued that those circumstances should preclude the release of records of the closed sessions called under attorney-client privilege.
In his closing statement, Bundy added that a court review of the records "would be an intrusion of the judiciary" on the board of commissioners, a legislative body.
