OpenCdA attended the November 4 meeting of the Kootenai County Board of Commissoners (BOCC) and the Airport Advisory Board (AAB). The agenda indicates that the official business was to be limited to a discussion of the hiring process to replace the dismissed Greg Delavan as the Airport Director for Coeur d’Alene airport (COE).
It soon became apparent that its underlying intent of many participants was to publicly and politically lynch Commissioners Green and Tondee for their clearly illegal action to fire Delavan.
As we reported in our November 4 early morning OpenCdA post entitled Wrong Answer, Commissioner Green, Commissioners Green and Tondee agreed to fire Delavan while seemingly violating just about every part of the Idaho Open Meeting Law except the white spaces.
After our attendance at this near-lynching, OpenCdA has a few meaningless opinions about what we saw.
1. The local skewspaper (Coeur d’Alene Press) had stated editorially that Delavan’s firing was not for cause. But what if it was? What if the BOCC had sufficient cause to fire Delavan but in typically reckless and incompetent Idaho fashion had simply failed to properly document Delavan’s failures and counsel him?
Commissioner Dan Green is, in our opinion, ignorant — but he has a lot of company in Kootenai County. Green’s position, shared by many including some legislators, appears to be that government can and should be run like a business — even if that means breaking some pesky law. That position was characterized in the skewspaper article which stated, “Green said it doesn’t make sense to publicly vote on the record to terminate someone before the commissioners even contact the employee who is going to be terminated.” Translation into Greenian: “If the law doesn’t make sense to me, I’m not going to obey it.” Apparently the Idaho Open Meeting Law didn’t make sense to him and Tondee, so they chose to disobey it.
But the important question remains unanswered: What if the BOCC was right in its reasoning but legally wrong in its approach? What if Delavan deserved to be replaced?
2. A very substantial number of the people who spoke in Delavan’s support at the meeting, including those who are members of the AAB, could fairly be characterized as “customers” of the airport, aircraft owners and operators and businesses which not only use but depend on the airport directly for their revenue. It seemed clear from their expressions of support that Delavan had been managing the airport in pretty much the way those customers wanted it run.
Maybe in small business the customer is always right, but governance is not small business. In government as in this instance, the most vocal customer is not the only customer whose opinions are worthy of consideration.
More accurately, Delavan was not employed by the COE customers; he was employed by Kootenai County to manage the airport for the benefit of Kootenai County. While his presumed desire to deliver the best quality of facility and service to the aircraft owners and operators and the onsite or airport-dependent businesses was admirable, his first obligation was to manage the airport according to the policies and practices prescribed by his employer, Kootenai County.
Insofar as COE is concerned, Kootenai County’s customer base also includes other people and government bodies who are both directly and indirectly affected by COE’s presence and operation. The BOCC must consider their interests as well, and it is obligated to try and reconcile differences between the various customers for the benefit of the County and in compliance with applicable laws and regulations. We suspect this is the point Coeur d’Alene City Councilman Dan Gookin was trying to make in his online comment to the local skewspaper’s editorial.
3. The November 4 BOCC-AAB meeting began at 4 P.M. and concluded before 8 P.M. before the election polls closed. At the time they spoke at this meeting, Marc Eberlein and David Stewart had not yet been elected to replace Commissioners Tondee and Nelson on the BOCC. When Eberlein and Stewart spoke, they indicated that if elected, they would likely vote to reverse Delavan’s dismissal. They indicated that if the BOCC proceeded to dismiss Delavan, the BOCC should make prospective applicants for the Airport Director position aware of that. Both Eberlein and Stewart handily won their respective Commissioner positions in the voting, so they are now Commissioners-elect.
We wish Eberlein and Stewart had been more circumspect with their prejudicial statements about actions they intended to take if elected to the BOCC. We must assume that they had not seen whatever evidence the current BOCC had supporting its decision to dismiss Delavan. We hope that when Commissioners-elect Eberlein and Stewart walk into the County Administration Building to be sworn in, they will check their “My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts” attitudes at the door. They’re about to learn that holding public office can be somewhat like sliding down a banister topped with a very sharp straight-edge razor.
4. Of all the people whom we heard speak at the November 4 meeting, only two — Gary Ingram and Brent Regan — made fact-based and law-supported presentations. Both argued, as we had in our early morning OpenCdA post on that day, that the BOCC’s firing of Greg Delavan was void because they had violated the Idaho Open Meeting Law. OpenCdA has submitted an Idaho Public Records Law request to the BOCC for the agenda and minutes of the meetings in which Delavan’s dismissal was considered and decided. However, it appears from this skewspaper article that the present lame-duck BOCC has taken action to do what it believes will “cure” its previously illegal action.
Now we’re curious to see how Greg Delavan responds. Logically, he should have been discussing his options with a labor law attorney if he hopes to return as COE’s Airport Director. That’s what we would have done if we were in his shoes. Of course if we were in his shoes and knew that we deserved to be fired, that there was sufficient cause for our firing, we might not want any of that being made public in court. We might instead prefer to rely on the implied assurances of Commissioners-elect Eberlein and Stewart. But we’re not in Delavan’s shoes, and we don’t know what if any evidence the BOCC has to support his dismissal.
We harp on process in many of our posts. Too many elected officials are outcome oriented — if the outcome is desirable, the process to arrive at it doesn’t matter. In their view, what they believe to be a desirable end completely justifies whatever the means needed to achieve it, even if those means violate the law. We saw that in the BOCC’s clumsy (at best) firing of COE Airport Director Greg Delavan.