ARLINGTON — The Arlington School District recently received from the state a clean audit of its 2008-09 finances, one free of problematic findings.
“Appropriately and efficiently handling money entrusted to us by our public is very important to the school district,” said Deb Borgens, executive director of financial services.
Outstanding in the financial statements of the district, however, is the possible payment of attorney’s fees for the Spokane-based Center for Justice, which sued the district in 2008 over violations of the state Open Public Meetings Act.
The state audit of the district found no recent violations of the public meetings act, but the way in which the school board previously entered into executive sessions was a problem in 2007. That year, the state Auditor’s Office told the school district it needed to change its practices on open meetings.
At the time, the board regularly conducted executive sessions before starting most of its scheduled public meetings. District officials said they thought they were doing people a favor. The idea was they could have the regular meetings and not make people wait around for the board to finish closed-door sessions.
State auditors, however, told school officials that the law required the school board to first meet in public before convening an executive session. Further, auditors said the district was doing an inadequate job of explaining the board’s legal grounds for taking the public’s business behind closed doors. The school district agreed with the auditors’ findings and changed its practices, said David Hokit, the district’s lawyer.
About a year after the Center for Justice sued the school district over the previous public meetings violations, both the center and the district asked Snohomish Superior Court Judge Ellen Fair for summary judgment in the case.
The school district admitted that school board members had repeatedly violated the state’s open meetings act as the center claimed, but in October, Fair ruled that board members did not intentionally hide information from the public and so were not required to pay individual fines.
Outstanding now is the court’s ruling on whether Arlington School District will have to pay the fees of lawyers who brought the suit for the Center for Justice.
The meetings act contains a provision that if a party brings a suit and prevails, it is entitled to its attorney’s fees, Hokit said. The school district would be responsible for any fees assessed by the court.
The suit was brought as part of the center’s statewide effort to bring attention to enforcement of the Open Public Meetings Act, said the group’s lawyer Greg Overstreet.
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