PORT ANGELES — Did Port of Port Angeles commissioners play loose with state law in the way they narrowed 22 applicants for executive director to their top choice during three meetings?
“Any discussion about who they should appoint should be done in public, or any deliberation on who they should negotiate with should be done in public sessions,” Tim Ford, state assistant attorney general for open government, said last week.
“We didn’t deliberate” in closed session, John Calhoun, port commission president, said Thursday.
Said Commissioner George Schoenfeldt: “We did exactly what we were supposed to do. I’m pretty proud of the way we did it, to tell you the truth.”
Commissioners discussed candidates in executive sessions on July 17, July 27 and Monday, when they came out of the closed meeting and immediately voted unanimously to have Port attorney Dave Neupert negotiate with Candidate A for the position, Calhoun said.
Commissioners are not naming the applicant to protect his status at his present job, Calhoun said.
The candidates had been narrowed to three; one finalist dropped out before the Monday meeting.
The other two were referred to as Candidate A and Candidate B.
“We had an executive session where we narrowed it from 22 to three, then met again to narrow it further and were unsuccessful, so we had further study of the applicants, then we met Monday,” Calhoun said.
“We decided to continue to evaluate those three and to no longer evaluate the others,” said Calhoun, who is running for re-election against Brad Collins, deputy director for resource development and capital projects at Serenity House.
“We can express our opinion on which candidates we think have the best qualifications. There were no decisions made here.”
No decisions
State open meetings law allows elected boards to meet in executive sessions to evaluate the qualifications of applicants for public employment but does not allow the elected officials to deliberate on or make selections or other decisions, Ford said.
He said the process employed by port commissioners “creates the perception” that they violated the law by appearing to make decisions in executive sessions.
“I just have no idea whether that is true or not, but certainly the perception is created by the governing body directing the attorney to negotiate with a specific candidate,” Ford said.
Citing Miller vs. City of Tacoma, a 1999 state Supreme Court case, Ford said the court made it clear that even if elected officials don’t make final decisions in executive sessions, they cannot stray beyond what is explicitly allowed.
“They need to clarify why they made the decision to direct their attorney to negotiate with a specific candidate and if there were any deliberations in executive session regarding the direction for that particular candidate, and they need to make those deliberations public,” Ford said.
He said a tainted selection process would open the port to possible lawsuits by applicants who were not selected.
Ford was on vacation and unreachable by phone on Thursday, his assistant said.
Greg Overstreet of Olympia, Ford’s predecessor and now a lawyer with Allied Law Group, which focuses on enforcing open government laws for non-governmental clients, said Thursday that “narrowing” down candidates to finalists is the same as making a decision.
“When it comes to a deliberation or narrowing of candidates, that is beyond discussion of qualifications, and that is definitely making a decision,” he said.
“There’s a logical gap somewhere if they really didn’t make a decision and came to a decision so quickly without discussion.”
Followed the law
Calhoun, Schoenfeldt and Commissioner Jim McEntire, all interviewed separately, said the commissioners took great care to follow state public meetings law under Neupert’s guidance.
Neupert did not return repeated calls for comment.
In an e-mail to the Peninsula Daily News on Wednesday, Neupert took issue with the newspaper’s characterization of Candidate A in its Tuesday edition as being “chosen by the three port commissioners from two finalists in a closed-door executive session Monday.”
“That is not what happened,” Neupert wrote. “The commission did not vote or make a selection in executive session.”
Schoenfeldt, who made the motions to direct Neupert to negotiate with Candidate A, said the commissioners “discussed the merits of the candidates” in the executive session on Monday.
Unlike Calhoun, Schoenfeldt said the commissioners again discussed the candidates’ qualifications in open session before Schoenfeldt made his motion.
“We discussed the merits of each one,” Schoenfeldt said.
“We did exactly what we were supposed to do. I’m pretty proud of the way we did it, to tell you the truth.”
McEntire said the commissioners “did everything right by the book.”
He said commissioners talked in executive sessions about which candidates they “preferred.”
“I would not call it ranking,” he said. “My own preference was to find some local talent.”
One applicant is Jeff Robb, director of the port’s William R. Fairchild International Airport.
He said as of midafternoon Thursday that he had not been contacted by Neupert.
McEntire said the commissioners came out of executive session and “had a colloquy” about who was their top choice for “five, 10, 15 minutes or so, something like that.”
Both Candidate A and Candidate B are males, Calhoun said, refusing to say if either lives on the North Olympic Peninsula.
Port meetings are taped, though executive sessions are not.
Sometimes when port commissioners reconvene after an executive session, they tape the session, but sometimes they don’t, Calhoun said.
Often them meet after executive sessions and simply adjourn, he said.
They did not tape the action they took after Monday’s executive session, Calhoun said.
The executive director position was advertised without a salary, a number that will be negotiated as part of the new director’s contract.
Former Port Director Bob McChesney, who resigned earlier this year to become Port of Edmonds executive director, was paid $123,000 a year.
Also at Monday’s meeting, commissioners extended for up to 30 days Bill James’ contract as interim director.
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Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
