Saltville council acknowledges improper closed session

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

In the Saltville Town Council chamber Monday as the council members and audience gathered for the 7 p.m. called meeting, a whiteboard stood like a billboard advertising the divisiveness that has beset the town and come to a head this month.
In green ink at the top of the board was written “Saltville” and below it, “If you don’t love it leave it. There are 5 roads out. Bye.”
Below that: “We do love it. That’s why we’re staying. We want you to leave.”
And below that, a signature of sorts: “Citizens of Saltville.”
The writing was accompanied by an egg-headed cartoon figure, eyes crossed and tongue sticking out.
The board with its words and bizarre face stood at the front of the room even as council members opened the meeting, reconvening the council’s Sept. 9 meeting that ended in a walkout by Mayor Jeff Campbell and three council members. The sudden departure of Campbell and council members Todd Young, Neil Johnson and Danny Maiden broke the quorum required for council votes, including a vote to return to open session and to certify appropriate conduct of the closed session.
After the walkout, Rusty Cahill, Tom Holley and Dickie Dye were powerless to legally reopen the closed session and adjourn.
By unanimous vote Monday the council members said they could not certify their discussion in the aborted Sept. 9 closed session met legal the requirements of Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act.
Formerly called executive sessions, closed meetings are allowed through exemptions in public access laws that assume that except for a few narrowly defined reasons, meetings of public bodies like town councils are presumed to be open to the public.
When councils re-enter open session and the audience returns to the meeting room, bodies are required by law to then certify the discussion behind closed doors was limited to reasons that are allowable under law and were listed in the council’s vote to enter the closed session.
Saltville’s Sept. 9 closed session was for the stated purpose of discussing actual or probable litigation, real property and personnel. On Monday, after reopening the closed session, the council members were silent when Campbell, coached by town attorney Christen Burkholder to phrase the request in the positive, asked the council for a motion to certify the discussion was limited to those matters.
The motion died for lack of a second. “Now ask it the other way,” Burkholder told Campbell.
Campbell asked for a motion that matters were discussed beyond those stated reasons for the closed session. Cahill made the motion, Neil Johnson seconded it and the vote was unanimous.
The errant arguments that ensued in the closed session prompted the walkout, according to council members.
Maiden said Cahill and Johnson had a discussion about matters not on the agenda. “I left by the nearest door,” he said. Cahill also said things were discussed that were not approved. Cahill did not leave.
Young said he “got up and left” when “something was said” about people in the Government Plant neighborhood.
Johnson said the discussion turned “to personal issues that should never have been brought out in closed session.”
Campbell said the approved matters were handled, “but the discussion matriculated into other matters.” He said in a letter to the editor he departed to defuse a tense situation.
Before adjourning the meeting, Campbell turned to the writing on the whiteboard, saying it made him “feel like a high school principal.” He said he knew a Saltville newspaper reporter photographed the board before the meeting and said, “I know that makes a media story.” But he said the negative perception of the town that would result from its publication could divert investment by businesses.
“It’s what we do in public by which we are judged,” he said. “It doesn’t help the town when that is the perspective people get.”
Campbell said for the town to continue the growth it has seen over the last few years, “we have to get beyond that high school mentality.”