Flawed system may deter good intentions
by Pete Cunningham
*As printed November 14, 2007 in The Homer Index   

There is very little on this earth that could motivate me to read the Michigan Open Meetings Act. This is not to say that the law outlining proper procedure governmental meetings is very long. Including the various court rulings and attorney opinions, the act is only about 15 pages in its entirety. But even a small amount of single spaced, drier than a Woody Allen marathon legalese, complete with no pictures, jokes or end in sight can quickly make 15 pages seem like Oprah’s latest snoozer of the month.

The reason I subjected myself to enough “heretos,” “thereofs” and “by whiches” to make any sane man go cross-eyed, is because after last Monday’s village council meeting, I was convinced there was a better way to determine council appointments than the imperfect system that was used that night.

Six interested parties interviewed for Homer’s two vacant seats. After the last interview, Jewell Burkwalt motioned to have Scott Raysin appointed. A roll call vote was taken and Raysin was not approved by a vote of 2-3. The next two motions were unanimously approved for Mike George and Phil Robison. All three gentlemen, not to mention the remaining three candidates, would have been solid choices for the positions.

The problem I had wasn’t with who is now on the council, rather, I took issue with how they were chosen. The fact that a roll call vote was used seemed off to me, particularly, the fact that the roll call was in a different order for each candidate.

Brent Michael jokingly quipped that he would abstain when the order of the second roll call put him as the deciding vote. Although Michael’s comments were in jest, the reality is that something as simple as the order in which the votes were cast could have completely swayed who was chosen.

Let’s revisit Raysin’s case. Burkwalt voted yes, followed by a no from Mike Warner a yes from Jeff Sherman and a no from Michael. This made Chris Miller’s final and deciding vote about more than just an approval of Raysin. It was suddenly about unanimity, both among the council and the community. Would his vote have been different had he been third after yeses from Burkwalt and Sherman? While we’re dealing with hypotheticals, would Michael and Warner still have voted no if Miller was the third yes, knowing that Raysin would be appointed either way?

Without making blind conjectures about the various ways in which votes would have gone differently, it’s fair to say that, with the roll call vote, more than a council member’s determination of an individual’s qualifications could potentially go into their decision, and therein lies the problem.

The open meetings act, “prohibits a voting procedure at a public meeting which prevents citizens from knowing how members of the public body have voted,” and so the flawed roll call system is used to satisfy this. A ranked ballot, which has voters rank candidates and determines choices based on the lowest point total, satisfies this criteria as long as everyone’s rankings are read aloud, so why not use this? This system would also give the council the opportunity to rank all the candidates, which also was not done on Monday.

If you want to stick with the roll call style but eliminate outside influences, the council could signal a yay or nay with raised hands with their heads covered on the table. Sure, this practice is more common to second grade teachers trying to determine whether to play red rover or kickball during recess rather than by governments trying to pick leaders, but its goal of getting votes uninfluenced by others is something to be desired among the council.

Village manager Jerry Stonebraker informed me that he had spoken with the village attorney about different ways to go about the appointment process, and this was simply the only legal option. My dissection of the open meetings act confirmed exactly that. It’s unfortunate that this is the case, but it would be even more unfortunate if this deterred the four individuals - who ended up on the short end of the flawed procedure - from wanting to get involved in the community. I certainly hope this is not the case.