The Lane County Courthouse as seen in July 2024.
Rebecca Hansen-White / KLCC
The Oregon Government Ethics Commission has found Lane County Commissioners may have broken public meeting law earlier this year.
Specifically, commissioners may have improperly given notice for two executive sessions in March, when they were discussing a planned recycling diversion facility.
Executive sessions are among the rare times elected officials can exclude the public from their meetings, usually to discuss lawsuits, collective bargaining or other confidential legal matters.
Oregon is one of the few states that allows reporters to attend executive sessions in most cases, though they are not allowed to publish what they heard during the discussion. A KLCC reporter did attend one of the two meetings the Oregon Government Ethics Commission reviewed.
Oregon Ethics Commission investigator Daniel Pacheco found that the Lane County Commissioners read the public notice of the executive session at the end of their regular public meeting the day before, and then met only in executive session the following day.
“Doing a read-in at a regular meeting for a future-only executive session is insufficient to comply with the statute,” Pacheco said.
He said executive-session-only meetings are allowed, but the Lane County Commission did not provide enough notice to the public to comply with the law.
In testimony on the county’s behalf, attorney Liani Reeves said commissioners did not intentionally break the law.
“This is a historical practice that predated some or all the current commissioners,” she said. “Until now, we weren’t aware, and there hadn’t been any concerns raised about the way the meetings were being noticed.”
She said the county immediately changed its procedures when it was notified that its practices may fall short of Oregon open meeting laws.
Lane County Commissioner Heather Buch echoed Reeves comments during the hearing — saying every member of the board of county commissioners wanted to comply with the law.
“We know we are responsible for those meetings, we’ve taken every chance to change and adjust once this came to our knowledge” she said. “We hope that you know that there was no malicious intent.”
In a news release Wednesday, the Lane County Garbage and Recycling Association said it had filed the complaint about the executive sessions to the Ethics Commission.
The organization strongly opposed the recycling diversion program, known as CleanLane or IMERF, and in the months leading up to that executive session had said it might sue the county over the project.
Jake Pelroy, the group’s spokesperson, argued the potential violations were evidence the county had been deceptive about the CleanLane project.
“We will continue to advocate for transparency and accountability related to this boondoggle,” Pelroy said. “Raising garbage prices is a regressive tax that hurts us all.”
The Ethics Commission voted to investigate the matter last week, and plans to provide the county with a letter of advice.