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THE PATH TO DESTRUCTION
The illegality of the city attorney’s advice, the attorney general’s advice, and the Lake Geneva City Council going along with it.
Here is the Lake Geneva City Attorney’s opinion about the opinion rendered by the District Attorney regarding the holding of a confidential city council meeting but publishing no notice about what was to be the subject of discussion in that meeting: “The following is an excerpt from the State Bar of Wisconsin Public Meetings Open Records Handbook. It cites the opinion of the Attorney General on the litigation exception to open meetings law. I had previously told you that litigation was the one exception where specificity was not required. The below quotation gives insight to this exception” (Dan Draper).
This opinion then quotes the D.A.’s opinion, which is only an opinion expressing the fact that the D.A. can make an exception to legislative law even though not part of the legislative body by choosing not to pursue any charges or investigations: “Providing notice of a closed session pursuant to this rule is an exception to the specificity requirement. Reynolds Correspondence, supra § 17.3 . The attorney general has written that a governmental body committed no violation of the open meetings law by merely citing the above-referenced statutory exception without further detail of the specific subject matter to be discussed. The attorney general determined that the notice did not have to state the specific subject matter of the business because, unlike some exceptions, the exception found in Wis. Stat. § 19.85(1)(g) does not include multiple categories. The exception found at Wis. Stat. § 19.85(1)(g) itself is clearly related to only one category of business (e.g., legal strategy and advice regarding imminent or current litigation), so that those reading the notice in effect received sufficient notice of the matter to be discussed.” Id.
Further, as the attorney general wrote:
“Advanced public disclosure of litigation a government body is likely to commence, or publicly noticing information about threatened litigation, could compromise a governmental body’s strategic position in that litigation. The purpose behind the exception for discussing legal strategy with one’s lawyer is the recognition that governmental bodies sometimes need to be able to operate within the protections of the attorney-client privilege in order to promote the free flow of information between public official clients and their attorneys.”
There’s the rendered ‘opinion.’ The law states that meetings must have subjects, and those subjects, whether the meetings are normal or confidential, must be published before the meeting is conducted to the electorate. This whole chain of idiocy, although legal (but not ethical), was about a meeting held in order to have the council quiver in fear because certain property owners living along the course of the bike and hiking path that the city wants to put in on South Street are threatening to file suit. The district attorney and the city attorney can make all the personal exceptions they want with the power they hold, but the law is the law, and that fact should be respected.
Why are these legal games being played, and why is the city council going along with them?
The meeting was illegal and therefore the council members who attended were not, and are not, bound by confidential requirements, certainly not in the opinion of a district attorney who should not be rendering such opinions. This is a messy situation which you will see if you get in your car and go to South Street and check out what the city supposedly wants to do. This path, ten feet wide, goes right through many homeowners’ yards and requires the destruction of many trees that are fully mature and of many years of growth. This path should never be built and it sure as heck shouldn’t be built using right-of-way provisions, or other legal devices, to basically take homeowner’s land from them, not to mention allowing the public to access corridors that pass right next to private homes.
