The Baltimore County Council held an unpublicized, closed meeting Friday to discuss who should be the next county executive.
With that meeting, the council appears to run afoul of Maryland’s Open Meetings Act.
On Tuesday, the Council announced it had picked Kathy Klausmeier as the next county executive hours before it was scheduled to take the official vote.
Councilman Izzy Patoka told WYPR that three days before Tuesday’s vote, the council held a closed session.
“Where we deliberated and we were looking for a candidate that could secure all seven council members and we landed on Senator Klausmeier,” Patoka said.
He added the County Council announced Klausmeier’s appointment in advance of the official vote to be fair to the other four candidates who were vying for the position.
“We wanted them to not be surprised,” Patoka said.
The Open Meetings Act requires a public body to first give the public notice of a meeting then convene in open session. At the meeting, the presiding officer must then “make a written statement of the reason for closing the meeting.”
That didn’t happen.
Former Councilman Tom Quirk said the County Council should have been more open, especially considering the importance of what it was discussing.
“It should have been fully transparent,” Quirk said. “Unfortunately it wasn’t.”
Thomas Bostwick, the County Council’s legislative counsel, confirmed in a statement that public notice was not given for the meeting.
“It was an emergency meeting requested by me on Friday stemming from the inclement weather forecast for Monday and what our contingency plan would be, so it came up rather quickly with everyone’s schedules,” Bostwick wrote.
He added that no vote was taken regarding the next county executive.
“I believe the Council adhered to the spirit of the Open Meetings Act,” Bostwick wrote. “The Councilmembers never made any secret of the fact that they met.”
Several County Council members did not return requests for comment.
Roger Hartley, the Dean of the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore said the Open Meetings Act is directly about the transparency of government work.
Hartley said, “We want to ensure that we don’t go back to the old Tammany Hall era days of corruption where decisions of public importance are made in back rooms without the public knowing about them.”
Maryland’s Office of Attorney General determines Open Meetings Act violations.
