The Missouri Attorney General’s Office sent a Dec. 1 letter to the Jefferson County Health Department claiming the agency’s Board of Trustees has violated the Sunshine Law, which requires governmental entities to make most meetings, records, votes and other actions open to the public.
Health Department officials say they have not violated the law.
“JCHC vigorously denies that it has violated the Sunshine Law,” the department said in a Dec. 4 written statement.
In its letter, the Attorney General’s Office said it investigated 25 Sunshine Law complaints against the Health Department board related to the following five general areas:
■ The board holds public meetings at locations too small to accommodate the people who want to attend.
■ The board holds public meetings at inconvenient times for the public to attend.
■ The board doesn’t hold public comment periods during its meetings and doesn’t read or listen to public comments submitted electronically or during its virtual meetings.
■ The board held at least one closed meeting to discuss and vote on changes to its bylaws when the meeting should have been an open one.
■ The board didn’t include enough specific details about items to be discussed at public meetings and failed to provide the public with advance copies of proposed ordinances and resolutions.
“After extensive investigation, our office concludes that these allegations are supported by evidence and many are likely meritorious,” the Attorney General’s Office said in its letter to the Health Department. “We further conclude that the board has failed to comply with the spirit and numerous best practices of the Sunshine Law. The board’s public meeting practices present a picture of leaders who desire to conduct public business with as little contact as possible with the very public they are elected to serve.”
The Attorney General’s Office said the board must “change course immediately” or risk “enforcement action up to and including financial penalties.”
To avoid penalties, the Attorney General’s Office recommended the Health Department board take the following four steps.
■ Attend a free Sunshine Law training course provided by the Attorney General’s Office.
■ Find larger meeting spaces for meetings.
■ Post copies of proposed resolutions and ordinances when it posts meeting notices and agendas.
■ Implement a public comment period for meetings.
Health Department officials said those recommendations seem extreme.
“The requests made by the Attorney General’s office appear to be drastically overbroad and outside the scope of its statutory authority,” the Health Department said in its written statement.
According to the Health Department statement, it is evaluating its “rights and remedies.”
“While we fully support transparency in the conducting of meetings, we do not support extra-statutory requirements that hinder the ability to conduct the business of the JCHC in an efficient manner, thereby impeding our ability to protect and promote public health,” Health Department officials said.
Dennis Diehl, the Health Department board’s chairman, said the letter was a surprise because he has been in contact with the Attorney General’s office about the complaints.
“We’ve responded to every question or complaint that we’re aware of,” he said. “We hadn’t been told there was a problem with any of those things. I don’t know what prompted this communication from them at this point.”
Diehl said he doesn’t think the board has violated the Sunshine Law. “I’m confident we haven’t done anything that is a problem with the Sunshine Law,” he said.
Diehl said he hopes to find out more details about the alleged violations so they can be addressed.
“We don’t want to be in non-compliance,” he said. “We certainly don’t want to be penalized for anything.”
Diehl said the board attorney, Christi Coleman, told him the penalties could include a $1,000 fine.
Health Department Director Kelley Vollmar said she also was surprised to get the letter and does not believe there have been any violations.
“Our meetings are routinely held with extra chairs available,” she said. “We also have been broadcasting our meetings to accommodate individuals who wouldn’t be able to make the meeting at that time. We do livestream them and then post them later.”
Diehl said the board did have a discussion with the attorney about bylaw changes in a closed session, but all the votes were taken in open session.
He also said the public always has been allowed to share opinions with the board, if not at a meeting then through email or other means. “I think we’re all very well aware of all these different opinions people have in the community,” he said. “We get emails all the time; we get communication on social media. People certainly have opportunities, and they were able to make comments during the live streaming too. I don’t think there’s anything new on the horizon about what people’s attitudes are, what their opinions are. Again, we’re well aware of those. Whenever we get public comments, in my opinion, most of them are based on misinformation, incorrect information, stuff that people see on Facebook or other social media.”
Diehl said the board has discussed moving meetings to a larger location, but there could be problems with livestreaming them from the new venue and having Health Department employees travel to the other location.
“I have no problem with finding another venue if we can find one that works for us and to satisfy all those issues,” he said. “But again, the situation is nobody’s showing up to the meetings. I mean, they did show up for the public comment meetings we had.”
He said only one person came to the Nov. 30 meeting.
Diehl said moving the meeting to an evening time has been considered, but employees would have to be paid overtime.
Both Vollmar and Diehl said they have requested Sunshine Law training from the Attorney General’s Office and have never heard back.
Vollmar said Coleman has reached out to the Attorney General’s Office for more information about the alleged Sunshine Law violations.
Matt Hay, 40, of Fenton said he submitted one of the 25 Sunshine Law complaints in early September 2020 and received a response from the Attorney General’s office on Dec. 1.
“My complaint was focused on kind of what I saw as the abuse of emergency meetings and basically throwing things on the agenda,” he said. “This was around the masking resolution (the Health Department) initially tried to pass at their meeting.”
The board approved a mandatory mask ordinance on Aug. 27, 2020, but revoked it less than 24 hours later at an emergency meeting, before the ordinance went into effect. Hay said the board’s attorney at the time had not seen the mask order until a couple of hours before the meeting.
“The Sunshine Law requires all of this stuff be posted publicly and 24 hours in advance to meetings, and if you do have an emergency meeting, you have to actually be able to enumerate what that emergency is. It’s not just that we wanted to do something quickly.”
Hay said he knows about the Sunshine Law because he was an Arnold City Council member from 2008-2010 and believed they were violating it, so he filed a complaint.
“I wondered how an organization could operate like that; it just seemed crazy to me,” he said.
Hay said he has watched many of the livestreamed meetings, but has never attended a meeting.
“Their meetings tend to be at like three o’clock in the afternoon, which other than having it maybe like one o’clock in the afternoon, it couldn’t be a more inconvenient time because I have a full-time job,” he said.
Hay said he hopes the Health Department starts to follow the law but worries that might not happen after seeing the department’s statement on Facebook.
On Nov. 30, the Health Department board created a legal subcommittee made up of trustees Amber Henry and James Prater, and those two were expected to meet Tuesday to discuss the Attorney General Office’s allegations.
The Health Department posted an agenda for the legal subcommittee meeting, but the meeting will mostly be a closed session, Vollmar said.
“We’re just putting this (agenda) together to ensure there’s visibility to the meeting, to let people know we’re having a meeting, and to let them see the agenda for it,” she said.