Public meetings in Oglethorpe County are meant to be just that — public.
However, members of the community sometimes find meetings closed off after the simple calling of an executive session, when the meeting will continue away from the eyes of both the public and the media.
This may feel contradictory to Georgia’s robust laws regarding meeting openness and transparency, but it’s legal.
Executive sessions are used to make decisions behind closed doors.
“Sometimes you have to talk in private about things,” Oglethorpe County Commission Chair Jay Paul said.
Executive sessions are called in Oglethorpe County by the Board of Commissioners, city governments or the Board of Education in order to discuss litigation issues, personnel changes, purchases of property or cybersecurity issues, Paul said.
The most common of these are personnel matters.
“If you’re going to fire an employee, you’re not going to have that conversation out in the public,” Paul said.
The Board of Commissioners must only hold an executive session during a regularly scheduled meeting, they must announce it publicly and they must state why they are going into executive session, said Richard T. Griffiths, a member of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation.
“This is the place of greatest tension between public officials and the citizens about understanding what’s going on,” Griffiths said. “This is the one area where the county can step back and disappear behind those closed doors, and that inevitably means that the public doesn’t fully trust what's going on, because they are not able to see it.”
The Board of Commissioners, or any other government body in executive session, however, can’t vote on issues in these behind-closed-doors sessions and must vote publicly, Griffiths said.
Sometimes, executive sessions are abused by state officials, he added.
However, they are seldom used in Oglethorpe County.
Paul said he has been involved in about six executive sessions at the county level in his four-plus years in office.
“I think for government to be effective, to be fair, they need to have that opportunity to be able to go into executive session,” Griffiths said. “Being transparent about the reasons, and then voting in public removes the cloud of doubt around those meetings.”