Was it Casey Stengel or Yogi Berra who gave us the piece of wisdom that “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over”?
No matter. The problem is that “over” is still a relative term.
The Putnam County Board of Commissioners may have thought the six-month haggles over a revised short-term rental (STR) ordinance would be over when they moved the final vote on the ordinance back to their Sept. 1 meeting instead of the tentative Sept. 19 mid-month meeting mentioned in work sessions earlier.
For the moment, they were wrong, at least about the “over” part. The office of State Attorney General Christopher Carr has become involved.
In an Aug. 30 letter to County Attorney Adam Nelson, Assistant Attorney General Danna Yu asked for a response to a citizen complaint about possible violations of the state’s open meetings and open records acts. She asked for a response from the Putnam board within 10 business days. On Monday afternoon, the response was in draft form but had not yet been forwarded to her.
The complaint came from Charles Trumbo, who alleged that a quorum (three members) of the commissioners had “met to change certain short-term rental bylaws without proper notice to the public.”
Trumbo, who serves on the five-member Republican county committee, ran an unsuccessful write-in campaign last year for the chairmanship of the commission.
Trumbo’s letter was referring to a late July meeting, after which changes in the direction of the draft ordinance appeared that shifted more toward STR owners. As it turned out, the meeting was the usual agenda-setting gathering of two commissioners (Chairman Bill Sharp and Chairman Pro-tem Daniel Brown) and two top staffers (County Manager Paul Van Haute and County Clerk Lynn Butterworth).
The changes in the draft ordinance included key provisions involving STR capacity limits (raised from 12 to 16) and the cap on the number of STR licenses (raised from 300 to 400, and since reduced to 350).
While the exact wording of the county’s response to the attorney general’s letter was not known before this week’s publication deadlines, the gist of it will focus on “meeting” and “passage,” according to Nelson.
A meeting involves a quorum of three commissioners and not one-on-one conversations. Sharp and Brown have each stated the commissioners routinely have one-on-one contacts. “I talk to each commissioner at least once a week,” said Sharp. “It is just good management practice, connecting with your people.”
In the several work sessions to identify problems, study alternatives, build a consensus, and shape the ordinance, “nothing was ever ‘passed,’” said Van Haute.
Sharp insists that not only were no calls to other commissioners made during the agenda-setting meeting but also that all procedures were legal and guided by the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG) manual on open meetings.
Leaning on those guidelines may lead to efficient and orderly formal meetings. However, too many of those in the bleacher seats (the spring and summer commission meetings drew 50 to 75 citizens several times), the proceedings may have seemed less like a debate of the issues and more like ratifications of decisions made behind the scenes.
As the lone Republican elected to the commission in 2002 – and eventually a 20-year veteran of the commission – Billy Webster has often recalled his initial experience of being left out of any pre-meeting discussions. “There were times I went to a meeting and had no idea what was going on,” he has said.
As for the attorney general’s involvement, his office does have “discretionary authority” to enforce both the open meetings and open records acts. It could entail a mediation program to resolve complaints between citizens and their local government. Or even litigation. Or nothing at all – no “over,” ever.
There are no deadlines for the use of that discretionary authority.