CCMSD board addresses "illegal" meeting concern

After an audience member complained that the meeting hadn’t been advertised ahead of time, the Board of Trustees for Crook County Medical Services District (CCMSD) opted to continue on with its agenda on Thursday.

However, to acknowledge the concern, no decisions were made, an additional meeting was scheduled for this Friday at 8:30 a.m. and the board acknowledged its error in a public statement.

Speaking after the meeting had concluded, audience member and board candidate Mark Koep stated that he commended the board for making the right decision in acknowledging his concern.

Raised Concerns

Koep raised his concerns as the meeting began, during the public comments section. He explained that he moved to this area 18 months ago and is now a candidate for the CCMSD board.

As such, he said, he has been trying to “catch up” on the goings on with trustee meetings, but has had a hard time figuring out when and where they would be held.

The official county website, he said, only had meeting minutes up to 2021, while the district website has a few meeting minutes, but at the time he looked there was nothing since May, 2022.

There was also no public notice of Thursday’s meeting at that time, he said.

Koep said he received no response to a query via the online form and was directed to the district number when he called the Crook County Clerk’s Office. When he called the district, he said, he was promised a call back but never got one.

In the printed notes Koep spoke from and later provided to the newspaper, he said, “According to information posted on the county clerk website regarding public board meetings, this current meeting is in violation of the Wyoming Public Meetings Act. Specifically, the notification requirements to the public about upcoming board meetings.”

Koep said the notice for Thursday’s meeting was posted less than 24 hours beforehand on the CCMSD website, at which time the missing meetings also appeared. He presented screengrabs of the source code showing that the minutes for June through September were not posted until last week, despite the date shown on the headline for each post making it appear they were posted much earlier.

Koep cited Wyoming State Statute 16-4-403, which says meetings must be open to the public and no action may be taken by a governing body except within a public meeting for which notice has been provided.

“Action taken at a meeting not in conformity with this act is null and void and not merely voidable,” according to the statute.

Koep acknowledged that the act is vague about how notification should take place, but said the board’s practice seems to have been to attach a public announcement to the previous month’s meeting minutes. Therefore, because those minutes have not been posted since May, he claimed that everything that happened at the regular meetings in May, July, August and September is null and void.

Board Response

In response to Koep’s comments, the board of trustees entered executive session for legal advice. While the outcome of this discussion was not publicly announced after the session ended, no decisions were made for the remainder of the meeting.

The board announced that another meeting was scheduled for Friday, October 8 at 8:30 a.m. and notice was sent to the newspaper and published on the website shortly afterwards.

“In accordance with the Wyoming Public Meetings Act and its bylaws, the CCMSD Board of Trustees schedules its next regular meeting at the end of each meeting. Notice is then provided to the Sundance Times, as well as to any person that has requested notice in writing in accordance with the Wyoming Public Meetings Act,” said the board’s attorney, Kara Ellsbury of Hirst Applegate, in a statement for the public following the meeting.

“The CCMSD Board of Trustees inadvertently failed to provide notice of the September 29, 2022 meeting. Accordingly, the Board of Trustees took no action at that meeting. The Board of Trustees regrets that this error occurred.”

The matter was not directly addressed during Thursday’s meeting. However, speaking afterwards, board chairman Mark Erickson confirmed the reason for the lack of notice.

“There was a clerical error and this meeting was not posted in a timely manner,” he said.

According to Wyoming State Statute 16-4-404, there is no actual time requirement for notice of a regular meeting.

This is because most boards and councils follow a schedule. For example, the Crook County Commissioners and Sundance City Council both meet on the first Tuesday of the month, negating the need for a monthly notice.

CCMSD does not follow a set schedule, but includes a provision in its bylaws that the time and location of the next meeting will be determined and publicly announced at each meeting.

Until recently switching website providers and updating its website, CCMSD provided the online link to its monthly meetings on the homepage and also made the minutes available, confirms Erickson. This was not replicated on the new website but, after the error was brought up, has now been reinstated.

The minutes have not been used as an official notice because historically they have usually been approved at the beginning of the next meeting, once the board has had time to review them.

Erickson also spoke to the reason for the dates of the meeting minutes not matching up on the website: this occurred during the website redesign, he said, when they were all reposted.