ANTIGO — Antigo Public Library Director Ada Demlow said she filed a complaint with the Langlade County District Attorney’s office Friday alleging the County Board violated open meetings law.
The complaint charges the County Board with breaking an open meetings statute prohibiting changes to a meeting agenda within 24 hours of the meeting itself without just cause.
Demlow said the County Board’s Administrative Committee meeting agenda changed last Monday afternoon — only several hours before the actual meeting began at 5 p.m. — to include a closed session involving the library.
“It didn’t show up on the agenda until a few hours before, and it was in closed session,” Demlow said. “That doesn’t make any sense that that was an emergency. And so if it’s not an emergency kind of situation, it requires 24 hours of notice. So they didn’t even have us on the agenda, and then they put it on there in the afternoon on the day of the meeting, and only because we’d been being very vigilant and watching did we even know. Of course, there were other issues with that meeting as well, but that’s one of them.”
Demlow said the late agenda change and closed session March 18 seem to be becoming part of a trend at County Board meetings involving the Antigo Public Library. The library has grown at odds with the county’s governing body in recent months amid disputes about a potentially-crippling budget shortfall it is projected to face in 2025 and recent signals the County Board has made that it may soon replace certain members of the Library Board.
“I can’t know why they did it, but I can know that it’s done consistently and I know that it feels to the citizens like it’s a way to keep them from knowing what’s going on in meetings, because the effect that it has is people don’t know,” Demlow said. “Whether or not that’s the intent, that’s the effect it’s having, and that is the reason it’s not within the law. That’s why the law is written the way it is, that you’re not supposed to be keeping the business of the people away from the people. The meeting before that, that Monday night meeting, they changed also close to the time limit as well, so that’s two in a row. So that’s a concern.”
However, Langlade County Corporation Counsel Robin Stowe, the attorney and legal advisor to the county, said that though last Monday’s Administrative Committee meeting agenda was amended less than 24 hours before it began, no violation of state statute occurred.
“I understand when there’s an issue in the community that we’re aware has special interest or heightened interest, you want to strive to provide as much notice as you possibly can,” he said. “But some of these situations can be very fluid, so it’s not surprising that the presiding officer of a committee would say, ‘The agenda’s already out, but now some circumstances have come to my attention, so we want to talk about this’ and then add it to the agenda with more than two hours notice. It’s covered under the law. Now if these same circumstances had existed for days and days and days, then no.”
Stowe said he deemed last Monday’s late agenda change legally appropriate when Langlade County Board Chairman Ben Pierce, the presiding officer at the meeting, requested it.
“As far as my conversation with Chairman Pierce, there were new circumstances that arose where he felt the need to add this to the agenda. Again, as long as this is something new and we needed to address this at that meeting, then that two hour rule applies,” said Stowe, who also has maintained that holding Monday’s and other recent talks about the library in closed sessions were legally acceptable. If you’re asking me if we got into bargaining and negotiations regarding the status of the library agreement, yes, I was there. Did we talk about names that would have impacted someone’s personal reputation and privacy interest in the community? Yes, absolutely,” Stowe said.
Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council President Bill Lueders suggested in an email to the Antigo Journal that the charge would be unlikely to stand in court, perhaps most of all because of broad language in Section 3 of Wisconsin Statute 19.84 stating that all that is needed to justify late agenda amendments is not an emergency, but simply “good cause.”
He sent a paragraph of the Wisconsin Attorney General Office’s Open Meetings Compliance Guide to clarify the matter.
“No Wisconsin court decisions or Attorney General opinions discuss what constitutes ‘good cause’ to provide less than twenty-four-hour notice of a meeting. This provision, like all other provisions of the open meetings law, must be construed in favor of providing the public with the fullest and most complete information about governmental affairs as is compatible with the conduct of governmental business. If there is any doubt whether ‘good cause’ exists, the governmental body should provide the full twenty-four-hour notice,” the paragraph states.
Lueders commented that whether the complaint will progress successfully in court will likely hinge on the phrase “good cause.”
“I think it is rare for bodies to say they have ‘good cause’ to take up a matter with less than 24 hours’ notice but it does happen and, as you can see, the AG says there is no case law or AG opinion that draws a clear line as to what is and is not permissible,” Lueders said. “In this case, based just on how aggrieved the library board is over this agenda change, I think the County Board should have given earlier notice if it was at all possible. But I doubt it is a prosecutable violation of the law, because the standard is so loose and imprecise.”
District Attorney Kelly Hays has not signaled whether, or when she will pursue Demlow’s complaint. However, it is clear that the bar for prosecution is high.
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