School Board violates law
FOG, open meetings attoney, say actions broke state statutes

By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — The county school board violated the state open meetings law in several ways when it selected finalists recently for interim school superintendent, says the state's leading expert on the Open Meeting Act.

Bob Johnson, director for the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, said Tuesday that any of the mistakes that the board made would put into question the legality of the decision they made that narrows down the list of candidates for the position from 12 to five.

And if a complaint was made, the school board faces the possibility of the state attorney general's office deciding that their decision was illegal and therefore null and void, which would require the school board to start all over again and hold its deliberations in public.

Added to this is still the dispute between the school district and the Gallup Independent over a decision so far not to release the name of all 12 people who applied for the position of interim superintendent of the Gallup-McKinley County School District.

It appears likely that the school district and the Independent may be going to court over that issue but Johnson Tuesday brought up several more concerns he had over the way the school board handled the entire matter at its last school board meeting.

What happened was out of the ordinary.

Usually, when the school board goes into executive session of legal or personnel issues, it just announces it's doing that and goes no further.

At the July 2 meeting, however, school board member Bruce Tempest made the motion to go into executive session saying he had talked to the district's attorney, Ramon Vigil, who said that the board needed to provide more information so Tempest added that the executive session was to "talk about the interim superintendent."

That didn't go far enough, said Johnson, who added that state law requires the board to explain in "reasonable specificity" the reason they are going into executive session.

In this case, Johnson said, the board should have said it was going into executive session to go over the resumes of people who have applied for the interim superintendent position.

Another error it made, he said, was not putting this on the agenda as well. Instead, the agenda just said it was going into executive session to talk about legal/personnel reasons.

A third mistake the board made, Johnson said, was when it came out of executive session and did not hold a public vote to determine the finalists.

It's obvious, he said, that some kind of decision was made in that executive session to whittle down the list of candidates from 12 to five, and since legally no votes are allowed in executive session, the board would have to take the vote in public.

But it did not do this, and no names were announced that night, and no vote was taken. Instead, a week later, the school district released the names of the five finalists.

Pat Rogers, the Independent's attorney who has handled a number of lawsuits dealing with violations of state laws in this area, said he also felt the school board made a number of errors.

"It would appear that the school board compounded its failure to comply with the Inspection of Public Records Act with clear violations of the Open Meetings Act; these are symbolic of an attitude to keep information from the public," he said.

"The public does have the right to the names of all of the applicants," he said, adding that the public should expect the school board to adhere to "strict compliance of the Open Meetings Act."