I’m sure you saw this in the news this week. I asked myself, ‘Why hasn’t this happened more often in South Dakota?’;
The Walworth County auditor faces charges of violating South Dakota law after she was arrested and charged with failing to follow state public meeting laws.
Walworth County Auditor Rebecca Krein is accused of violating a law that requires government entities to make documents available to the public when they are used during official meetings. Walworth County State’s Attorney James Hare issued a warrant for her arrest last week after he received a complaint that Krein failed to make documents available for an Aug. 6 meeting.
Did I miss the memo declaring that public officials should no longer experience shame for breaking the law? Publicly shaming elected officials for breaking the law is moral, necessary, and effective, even, sometimes, against the most shameless and corrupt of elected officials. We don’t hesitate to arrest and shame run-of-the-mill hoodlums on the street who wave shotguns and vandal murals. Why should elected officials not face cuffs and guff for violating the public trust?
I can’t speak for the rest of the state, but I can tell you that this happens quite often in Sioux Falls. In fact Cameraman Bruce and myself and several other citizens have complained about this multiple times. Some examples that have happened quite often in Sioux Falls at public meetings are starting meetings early (before posted time) and not handing out paper copies of the agenda at the meetings. The city council usually has this handled, but there have been several occasions in other city board and commission meetings where it has NOT happened. I would even dare to say that I could come up with over a dozen instances every year. So I find it a bit ironic that the state arrested this person in lowly Walworth County but NOT in Sioux Falls.
You know my soapbox by now. No local government agency (that I know of) in SD has ever gotten in trouble for being too open. In fact, state law is pretty clear about open meetings, they leave it up to the local agencies. The state legislature has essentially said, you can tell the public as much as you want to, but too often they choose not to. I was glad to see this arrest, but I would like to see a lot more of it. Putting these public officials in handcuffs may be the ultimate solution to opening up our books. As I have said before, not only is open government good for governing, it saves taxpayers money. Dictatorships only occur when the people in power have taken away our access to information, once that happens the dominos fall, really, really fast.
I attempted to have the city of Sioux Falls charged with open meetings violations due to meetings after official meetings and the memorable special meeting with the regular agenda at the regular time when the City Council “forgot” to post the agenda.
The practice of posting the the Agenda by Friday at 5:00pm Friday was codified when the then City Clerk tried to rewrite the posting time to the state requirement of 24 hours before the meeting. Michelle Erpenbach actually was upset by this requested change and pointed out she did her research over the weekend and pushed the codification.
I am ready to file more Open Meetings complaints due to the flagrant violation out Clerk’s office and city administrations continue to find ways to keep us from having the information we a right to.
“Public officials in handcuffs†is overdue. However, not arrests by a states attorney. Sioux Falls has irregularities worthy of federal charges. I’d not be surprised if there is FBI and ACLU investigations forthcoming. CMAR contracts deserve RICO attention. The ACLU is aware of the city denying circuit court appeals. They have a small office in the state and have focused on Indian Reservations. They’ll eventually get around to Home Rule Charter Oligarchy and focus on Sioux Falls.
Don’t hold your breath. We asked the ACLU to look into the School Bond election, particularly the fact there was NO precincts in the northern part of the city. We asked before the election. We wanted to know if there was any Federal election violations since the school district receives Federal Funds. We didn’t really get an answer and magically the bond passed. Now if we would have told them that the trans kids don’t have a place to pee pee at the schools, they would have been all over it.
The ACLU does a lot of good work, but like any organization, they can be parochial and/or co-opted at times.
Many years ago, under Uncle Ronny, I asked the SD ACLU leader to challenge Ronny’s federal student loan allocation regulations, which he and Stockman put into play. The ACLU leader at the time informed me, however – keep in mind, I was a young zealous liberal back then – that there was no such thing as “income discrimination,” which I alleged. But then he went on to talk about the importance of private colleges, which I think played a part in his disinterest in my discovered allegations.
You see, my investigative work at the time into federal financial aid under Ronny could prove that aid for middle and upper middle income families was actually based not on need, but rather on the cost of the education itself. My numbers, which I calculated, could prove at the time that an upper middle income family could receive more federal aid to send a child to Augie, then a middle class family would receive from the Feds to send their child to say, USD, which is obviously cheaper.
So trust me, all organizations, even the good ones, have their unfortunate limits.
( – and Woodstock states: “Yah, now you’re just old and zealous.” )