The Energy Futures Task Force was appointed by the Leelanau County Board of Commissioners in September and held its first meeting in October. For its first three or four monthly meetings, the task force did not post prior notices on leelanau.gov or make minutes publicly available.
Leelanau Energy President Joe DeFors was named chair of the Energy Futures Task Force at the October meeting. DeFors said that since the group was appointed as a “task force,” they did not know whether they were considered a public body, which are required to post meeting notices and minutes under the Michigan Open Meetings Act (OMA).
Tuesday, Leelanau County commissioners and Interim Administrator Richard Lewis received email correspondence between county Clerk Michelle Crocker and the county’s legal counsel, Cohl, Stoker, & Toskey, P.C.
In these emails, Crocker says that the Michigan State Police visited the county government center on the week of April 28 seeking information about the task force. This prompted the clerk to ask legal counsel whether the task force is considered a public body.
“The task force is not a ‘public body’ subject to the requirements of the OMA,” county attorney Matt Nordfjord wrote in response Monday. “As a result, the failure to post meetings, take minutes etc. does not violate the OMA in this fact pattern.”
Nordfjord argued that since the county board of commissioners “did not empower or delegate to the EFT the BOC’s decision-making authority,” but created the task force as an advisory body to identify opportunities for efficient and renewable energy implementation, they are not subject to the OMA.
Nordfjord went on to cite a 2022 Michigan Court of Appeals case where the court held that an entity’s title did not determine their status as a public body, so the title “task force” alone would not subject them to the OMA.
There are three county commissioners serving as members on the task force: Gwenne Allgaier, Melinda Lautner, and Kama Ross. The newspaper spoke with the commissioners after the county board’s executive session Tuesday to ask why the meeting notices and minutes were not posted.
Allgaier said she has been responsible for taking meeting minutes for the task force since the beginning and has been sending them to the county clerk’s office. When asked why the minutes weren’t being posted to the county website, Allgaier said this was due to a lack of oversight from then-county Administrator Deb Allen.
“The task force was voted in with a commitment that there be no county money spent, which means we would take our own minutes and not use county staff for that,” Allgaier said. “We talked to Michelle (Crocker), and she deputized me to take minutes, and they did the oath with all the members of the task force in the first meeting. We’ve submitted minutes from the first meeting. … We’ve taken minutes every meeting and we’ve been sending them in.”
Crocker and Administrative Deputy Clerk Alison Middleton verified that they were receiving Allgaier’s minutes “intermittently,” but did not post them online because they didn’t know which page to upload them on. According to Crocker, the interim county administrator, Richard Lewis, instructed them to post them at leelanau.gov/administration. asp. Lewis started as interim administrator in mid-April.
The newspaper received a notice from the clerk’s office prior to the task force’s first meeting in October and since March, but not for the intervening months.
Commissioner Lautner said that she knew nothing about these alleged OMA violations because she has only attended one-and-a-half of the task force’s seven meetings since October. Lautner pushed for the task force’s expansion from a 12-member to 14-member body, with one of the additional members being herself. When asked why she attended so few of the task force’s meetings, she cited scheduling confl icts with conferences in March and April and sickness in May.
Ross noted that as soon as the task force was alerted to the fact their meeting notices and minutes weren’t being posted, they took steps to fix it, and that the group’s meetings — which are held on the first Thursday of each month at the Leland Public Library — are open to the public.
