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Published Tuesday, September 23, 2008 in Local

Library trustees call meeting for today

By Sarah Fay Campbell

The Times-Herald

The Coweta County Library Board of Trustees has called a special meeting for today at 3:30 p.m.

The meeting, to be held at the Powell Library on Hospital Road in Newnan, is for discussing the agreement between Coweta County and the Coweta County Library System.

The meeting was announced Tuesday afternoon.

Also on Tuesday, the board released the minutes from last week's special meeting on the budget.

At the end of that meeting, the board went into a "work session" to discuss how board members would appeal to the county commission for various budget items at the budget public hearing the following night.

The work session was announced after the meeting was adjourned. Attendees at the meeting were told that it was no longer a public meeting, and were asked to leave the meeting room.

When asked Sept. 16 about the private session, board Chairwoman Liz Camp said that board attorney Pat McKee told them that the session was legal. Camp gave no additional information about the private session.

McKee did not respond to repeated phone calls requesting an explanation of how the work session was legal under state law.

Under Georgia open meetings laws, all meetings of government bodies must be open to the public. The library board is subject to the law.

A closed session, often known as an executive session, is legal, but only for specific purposes. Those are: to discuss personnel issues, to discuss acquisition or sale of real estate, and to discuss pending or potential litigation. To qualify for the litigation exemption, there must be a valid threat of litigation.

To close a session under the law, the governing body must make a motion to go into a closed session and, upon returning to open session, execute an affidavit stating that matters discussed in the session were in accordance with the law.

The minutes of last Monday's meeting state that the work session was held after the regular meeting "since it could not be discussed in this meeting because of laws regarding called meetings."

Board Secretary Ed Adams said that there were no minutes taken for the work session.

The Times-Herald made a verbal open records request to Adams, for the recording of the meeting, on Tuesday, Sept. 16, at approximately 8 p.m.

Adams stated at the time that it would be at least a week before the recording could be made available, because the cord that connects the digital recorder to a computer had been lost in the move to the new library.

As of close of business Sept. 23, the recording had still not been available. Adams did not respond to an additional request for the recording, but did state that the meeting minutes would be released on Sept. 23.

Under the Georgia Open Meetings Act, public records must be made available within three business days from the request being made. If the records cannot be made available by then, a written description of the records, along with a reasonable time table for obtaining the records, must be provided within three business days. Meeting minutes, however, do not have to be released until after the next meeting of the agency.

At the board's last regularly-scheduled meeting, held July 22, McKee had informed board members that they had violated the open meetings law by not posting an agenda within the required time period.