Variety of reasons led to consecutive council cancellations
Jim Hager
Lake Santeetlah – The Town of Lake Santeetlah Town Council is having a hard time getting together.
The council has cancelled every meeting since November, either because of procedural issues, prior commitments, illness, scheduled vacations, or combinations of these.
At the core of the issue is that two members have been flat-out unavailable. Ralph Mitchell was out of state for the holidays and subsequently became ill. Jim Hager was stuck in court during one meeting and on vacation for the others.
The Dec. 8 meeting was cancelled with staff being sick. It was rescheduled to Dec. 14, to follow a Town Hall Christmas dinner. At that meeting, only Mayor Connie Orr and council member Tina Emerson were present. Mitchell was with family in Ohio for the holidays, Hager was tied up in court as a Guardian ad Litem, and Diana Simon was ill.
That meeting was rescheduled to Jan. 5 – which again was cancelled due to lack of a quorum – and the regular Jan. 12 meeting was also cancelled for the same reason.
The reason for the Jan. 5 cancellation needs further explanation.
Simon and Hager said the meeting was improperly noticed.
“To have a meeting outside the regular scheduled dates requires a Special Called Meeting,” Hager wrote in an email. “A special Called Meeting must be advertised as such, and the specific agenda must be noticed, and no agenda item can be added. The meeting scheduled for tomorrow, January 5, 2023, does not meet this requirement.”
Simon suggested that a meeting be scheduled for Jan. 16 or later, when Hager would be available.
The same agenda has been bumped from cancelled meeting to cancelled meeting. It includes an update to water policy and fees, repairs to the town gate, ethics training, COVID-19 money and other routine items. Some of the information is already stale, such as announcements for a Dec. 10 Christmas parade and a notice that town hall would be closed the week after Christmas.
The agenda also includes establishing a meeting schedule for 2023.
Council members are growing irritated over the cancellations, judging from emails.
“This was one of the first times for us in history that this happened,” Mayor Gross wrote in one. “We needed to research policy’s to move forwards correctly.”
Town attorney Robert “Bo” Carpenter recommended the council hold a meeting in January because of the missed meetings.
As of Tuesday, the town’s website shows no further meetings scheduled for January.