The Woodstock Town Board voted August 17 to appoint councilmember Reggie Earls to seek qualified attorneys to investigate complaints of inappropriate behavior with a town employee filed by Bennet Ratcliff against town supervisor Bill McKenna.
McKenna called an emergency meeting with just over two hours’ notice to go into executive session to discuss “personnel issues within the town board.” McKenna and councilmembers Earls and Laura Ricci were present. The three opted to deliberate in open session. Councilmembers Ratcliff and Maria-Elena Conte were absent.
Ricci said Earls had been chosen because he can be unbiased.
“We thought he was the most neutral member of the board,” Ricci said. “I’m running with Bill. I would appear as biased if I were to help out.”
Ratcliff and Conte are parties in the complaint against McKenna. Ratcliff, who lost the Democratic primary to McKenna, is now challenging him in the November election on the Working Families Party line.
“I feel 100 percent comfortable that Reggie will find somebody who is not biased,” Ricci said.
Though McKenna voted for the motion, he invoked the rule of necessity, a common-law doctrine that permits a judge or official to rule on a matter despite bias or conflict when recusal would otherwise prevent the action. A majority of the board, or three votes, is needed to carry a motion.
Ratcliff objected to the propriety of the meeting. He said it violated the Open Meetings Law because ample notice was not given, nor an adequate reason.
Conte said she could not attend given the short notice because she was with a client.
Ricci defended the emergency meeting, citing town policy requiring a swift response to complaints.
“Our next town-board meeting is not for another three weeks,” she said.
“These are heavy charges,” McKenna said. “The accused are entitled to a quick review.”
Earls agreed. “We can’t just let this sit,” he said
Committee on Open Government responds
Shoshanah Bewlay, the executive director of the Committee on Open Government, cast some doubt on whether an emergency Woodstock Town Board meeting was proper or even necessary. She said emergency meetings are generally discouraged and the session likely wasn’t held within the spirit of the law. While meetings can be held quickly as long as effort is made to provide notice, Bewlay questioned the nature of the urgency.
She opined that someone could have been informally told to go find qualified attorneys or the town attorney could have been asked or recommend outside counsel, eliminating the need to hold a meeting while still not delaying the process.
If challenged in court, the only remedy to violating the Open Meetings Law is to vote on any motion again in a properly posted public meeting, which is within a week of the scheduled session, she said.
But Bewlay conceded that may be moot, since the board still needs to vote to issue a request for qualifications or RFQ, essentially a solicitation of bids, and to select an attorney from the responses.
Bewlay thought perhaps a cleaner way to handle it would have been to write up the language for the RFQ, get a list of attorney candidates and then hold a properly posted special meeting within a week to issue the RFQ.
Details of the allegations
Earls said he would consult with town attorney Rod Futerfas and possibly the New York State Association of Towns to assemble a list of attorneys who may be interested in responding to a request for qualifications.
Ratcliff said the allegations would remain confidential. In a campaign newsletter sent via email August 17, however, he provided some details.
Ratcliff said he and Conte had arrived early for an August 8 executive session he thought began at 6 p.m. but didn’t start until 6:15.
“When we walked in the door, we saw what appeared to be inappropriate workplace conduct in the supervisor’s office by Bill McKenna and a town employee,” he wrote. “What I saw made me very uncomfortable. But it was also not the first time I had seen something like this happening with the supervisor. I am interested in having a respectful workplace culture, and feel it is important to separate professional conduct and personal behavior. What I saw was definitely not okay.”
Ratcliff wrote that “after a lot of deep thinking” and reviewing the town code and employee handbook, he filed confidential complaints with the human rights commission, ethics board and town board.
The August 15 meeting of the town board was a forum for hostility, he wrote.
“People threatened my job, harassed me, intimidated a witness in the complaint, and revealed the identities of the others mentioned in the complaint,” Ratcliff wrote. “As chair of the town board meetings, the supervisor is responsible for overseeing a respectful work environment and for maintaining a confidential complaint process. Instead, supervisor McKenna sat back and allowed harassment, public attacks, threats, and intimidation to continue.”
McKenna’s wife, parents and others filled the room to show support for him. During the Public Be Heard portion of that meeting, a handful of people spoke about how Ratcliff was damaging the community through his divisive behavior.
“You are the most divisive individual that has ever beset our community. Your attempts to besmirch my husband’s good name and deeds are despicable beyond anything I could have ever imagined,” said McKenna’s wife, Hilary Sanders-McKenna, during the meeting.
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