The Horry County Council has routinely conducted business by e-mail, circumventing public knowledge of issues by scheduling meetings designed to avoid quorums, excluding three members who do not use e-mail, having in-depth discussions on issues pertinent to voters and taxpayer dollars and deleting e-mails that under state guidelines should have been kept as public documents.
The council may have violated the state's Freedom of Information Act by having several conversations about county business via e-mail that, according to the law, should have taken place in a public meeting. The Sun News obtained 1,348 pages of e-mails sent between January 2009 and January 2010 to and from County Council Chairwoman Liz Gilland's county-issued e-mail address, through a request filed under the state's Freedom of Information Act.
Some examples:
On Nov. 30 and Dec. 9, Gilland sent e-mails to a quorum of council members resulting in a debate on the search for a county administrator and showing a council where rampant infighting stood in the way of choosing a candidate.
On Jan. 13, Gilland sent an e-mail to schedule a meeting to discuss motorcycle rally issues, "without an audience" and without several interested council members being invited.
On June 7, 8 and 10, Gilland polled council members about their budget priorities, asked for a quiet passage of those priorities, and attempted to schedule a meeting of a group of council members shy of a quorum to "hammer out the details so that we don't look foolish when we meet as a group."
Council members routinely extoll the council's efforts to conduct open meetings, often citing the small number of executive sessions held during public meetings in recent years, but the nature of these e-mail conversations reveal a council that does not always conduct business as openly as the members proclaim and chooses to polish their public discussions in private.
Bill Rogers, the executive director of the S.C. Press Association, said regardless of whether a vote was taken, a discussion about county business, including the search for a new county administrator, by a majority of council members was inappropriate in a private setting and violated the spirit and letter of the state law.
"That's improper. ... That's just plain abhorrent," Rogers said. "I think that casts a legal pall over the entire search. The whole search could be thrown out because of that conversation in my opinion. The Freedom of Information Act covers that; you cannot conduct business or meet by electronic means ... and that's what this looks like."
The Freedom of Information Act request returned correspondence to or from Gilland, and councilmen Harold Worley, Brent Schulz, Gary Loftus, Howard Barnard, Bob Grabowski, Carl Schwartzkopf, Jody Prince and Al Allen, as well as council clerk Pat Hartley. Councilmen Paul Prince, James Frazier and Marion Foxworth do not use e-mail and did not return any documents.
In an e-mail string, Gilland directed the council members to study the resumes they received from The Mercer Group Inc., the executive search firm helping with the administrator's search, and choose a second round of finalists. The e-mail was sent the morning after the County Council deadlocked in a 6-6 vote on whether to pay an additional fee to Mercer to continue the administrator's search.
After the motion failed, and another motion with suggestions to move forward was not offered, the County Council adjourned.
The e-mail from Gilland on Dec. 9 and another e-mail sent Nov. 30 both sparked several rounds of responses and debate about how to move forward in the search, including whether to postpone choosing an administrator until after the next council election, whether to open the second round to previous finalists and whether to accept new resumes in addition to the Mercer findings - none of which is exempted from public discussion under the Freedom of Information Act.
"After that meeting, the feelings were really on edge," Gilland said.
"It wasn't an ordinary deadlock. People were at each others throats. The depth of feeling among the council members caught me off guard. The best thing to do that night was to adjourn, but the next council meeting was almost a month away so I tried to set forward a plan. It was a procedural discussion. It wasn't singling anyone out or trying to push any candidate forward, but to push us out of a deadlock and come up with a plan so that we could go forward."
Gilland said that calling a special meeting of council during the holidays would have been hard because of conflicting schedules, and that 100 percent participation of council would have been unlikely. The three councilmen without e-mail were not included in the e-mail discussions that occurred.
The S.C. Freedom of Information Act states that a public meeting is defined as "the convening of a quorum of the constituent membership of a public body, whether corporal or by means of electronic equipment to discuss or act upon a matter over which the public body has supervision, control, jurisdiction or advisory power."
In another round of e-mails, Gilland polled council members about how they wanted to spend taxpayer money, saying she wanted to see if there was a consensus.
Two days later after a budget workshop, Gilland sent an e-mail to two councilmen asking if they could live with the budget and if they planned to speak against the consensus during the public meeting.
"You're not going to try to get a crowd to vote no, are you? Two more no's and we start over," Gilland wrote.
She later sent an e-mail suggesting that five council members, two shy of a quorum, meet before the public discussion to hash through some aspects before the public meeting.
Rogers said the e-mails were inappropriate and that budget allocations and expenditures of public money should always be discussed in public.
"It's a violation of their trust as public officials having budget votes and or discussions via e-mail. As far as arranging meetings of [less than a quorum of council] that's just enabling an illegal meeting," Rogers said.
Several councilmen did not respond in e-mail to the budget question. Others answered briefly. Gilland said council members do not undergo any training about e-mail correspondence when they are elected.
"I think I probably disagree that those e-mails were not appropriate, in that all that does is give the chairman a heads up to where she might lead the discussion," Barnard said. "There were no negotiations; there was no chit chat back and forth. That would not be the way that I would do business, but had I disagreed I wouldn't have responded. ... I just saw that as informational."
Grabowski said the e-mails were purely informational.
"It's not out of the ordinary for us to coordinate with each other on issues, but no final decision is made until we are together as a full council in public. It's against ethics for us to gather in a quorum for lunch or for some event to discuss items, but I don't think e-mail has anything to do with that. I'm not uncomfortable discussing things over e-mail," he said. "I think if you look at the e-mails and look at the minutes of our meetings, a lot of the things that were discussed in the e-mails were again brought up in a council meeting and workshops."
Several proposals for the administrator search were only mentioned in e-mails between council members or were discussed at length in e-mails, but were only mentioned in a few sentences during the January meeting when the council compromised on a solution to move forward.
Foxworth and Paul Prince said they, for the most part, didn't feel left out of the discussions that were happening over e-mail and that they frequently caught up on e-mail conversations through phone calls.
Other council members said that if business were to change, it would likely mean the same conversations would take place in person rather than in e-mail.
"What occurs to me is that we ought to have an e-mail policy," Loftus said. "There's going to be a lot of gray we have to deal with. Can we come up with a policy that is relatively straightforward and clear? ... It's a gray area because would the same conversations have raised a flag if they had happened over the phone?
"And you can't tell me that everyone from the legislature to the city council aren't having similar discussions. I think you may see more people deleting e-mail messages and more people picking up a phone instead."
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