Newspaper to Roberta: Follow the law
There is an oft-used saying, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” That phrase generally comes up when some poor bloke has violated a law he may or may not have known about, but it also applies to city and county officials who are supposed to know about a set of laws that govern how they are supposed to conduct the people’s business. They are called the Georgia Open Meetings Act and the Open Records Act.
It is unfortunate, but there are several municipalities and departments that either don’t know the law or choose not to follow it. One of the most recent instances involves the city of Roberta in Crawford County. Last month, the Georgia Post published an editorial accusing Roberta of being in violation of the Open Records Act. The publisher of the Georgia Post, Victoria Simmons, said it was standard operating procedure for Roberta officials to violate the state’s sunshine laws. Simmons said they’ve failed to properly give notice of budget hearings and to give the public time to respond to draft budgets. And she said a quorum of council members regularly hang around and talk after meetings.
Just in case you were wondering if the open meeting and open records acts applied to Roberta; here’s what the law states: “Agency shall have the same meaning as in Code Section 50-14-1 and shall additionally include any association, corporation, or other similar organization that has a membership or ownership body composed primarily of counties, municipal corporations, or school districts of this state, their officers, or any combination thereof and derives more than 33 1/3 percent of its general operating budget from payments from such political subdivisions.
“ ‘Public record’ means all documents, papers, letters, maps, books, tapes, photographs, computer based or generated information, data, data fields, or similar material prepared and maintained or received by an agency or by a private person or entity in the performance of a service or function for or on behalf of an agency or when such documents have been transferred to a private person or entity by an agency for storage or future governmental use.”
So there is no doubt the laws apply to Roberta, and there was another part of the law that brought about a surprise visit from Mayor Becky Smith to the offices of the Georgia Post to deliver an audit, a document the paper had asked for last summer. According to the law, the audit should have been delivered “within three business days.”
The mayor said she didn’t know about the open records request. Again, remember the opening “oft-used phrase.”
As far as meeting notices, Roberta council member Ervin Patton, quoted in this newspaper said, “Perhaps we did miss one here or there. It wasn’t intentional. We don’t do anything in secret. We don’t intend to do anything in secret.”
Think about that for just a minute. What he’s actually saying is, “Perhaps we broke the law here or there. It wasn’t intentional.”
The Georgia Post, like any good newspaper, is supposed to be the watchdog for the community. The newspaper carries a sacred trust to keep an eye on how the governments in its coverage area spend taxpayer money. The publisher needs to continue her fight to see that Roberta officials follow the law. If that means filing a complaint with the Georgia Attorney General’s Office, so be it.
This story was originally published November 2, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Newspaper to Roberta: Follow the law."