County opens LNPC Yahoo! group to public

Possibly ill-advised, but not illegal; that was the word from Flathead County Chief Deputy Attorney Jonathan Smith in regard to a private Internet message board held by the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan Committee since November 2007.

Smith and Flathead County Planning Department director Jeff Harris spoke to members of the Lakeside Community Council last Tuesday during the regularly scheduled May meeting to clarify a recent incident in which the Lakeside council and members of the LNPC were instructed to open the Yahoo! account up to the public.

Concern over the Yahoo! account was raised when a handful of Flathead residents objected to the private nature of the account during a commissioner meeting late last month. Lakeside property owner Donna Thornton, Jim and Beverley Etzler, who own property north of Spring Creek Road, and American Dream Montana president Russ Crowder each contended that the Internet message board violated the public's right to transparency in any business or communication that pertains to matters of public interest.

American Dream Montana, a local property rights group, has actively opposed neighborhood plans and has been a vocal presence at neighborhood plan meetings in Lakeside and other neighborhoods in Flathead County.

Harris referred to accusations that the LNPC's Yahoo! account constituted a secret online forum as an attempt to call into question a very public process that people have worked hard on for a very long time.

"I can tell you that the account was used to facilitate information between committee members so they could prepare for public meetings," Harris said on Wednesday. "All of the work was done at the public meetings and was posted to the [official] Web site."

Smith said he felt certain that, once all of the messages and accompanying documentation had been printed and made available in a file at the planning office - which, according to Harris, has already been done - nothing had been done that would constitute illegal activity or place the work already done on the neighborhood plan in jeopardy. However, he stressed that any Internet site used for official business that is not open to the public review casts a shadow of secretiveness in regard to its contents and, consequently, should not be condoned.

"In my view, the statutes haven't kept up with technology," Smith told the Lakeside council on Tuesday. "It doesn't look good for the county to have a Web site that the public can't go to. Committees should not be having Web sites that other people can't get on."

Council member John Ulrich, who also serves on the neighborhood plan committee, took umbrage to the accusation that any secretive activity was conducted on the Yahoo! Account.

"All that the Yahoo! group was for was for was for us to have a way to pass documents back and forth so that we could see what people have mocked up, so that we could read it and didn't look like idiots when we had our meetings," Ulrich said. "We weren't holding secret meetings or anything like that."

Smith said, while the committee may have done nothing inappropriate over the Yahoo! account, the public had no way of knowing that if they could not see what was posted.

"It just doesn't look good to the public when they can't go on there and see what you're doing," he said. "Appearance is everything."

Ulrich said that, since he is also on the local park committee, he was tasked with the responsibility of writing up the section related to parks and posted it on the Yahoo! account for the other committee members to review.

"At that point the public is going to get to see it in a couple of weeks," he said. "All it did was give [the committee members' a chance to read it before the public meeting so that they could discuss it at the meeting. All the stuff [the public] would have wanted to make comments on was uploaded onto the website, which was the LNPC website that everyone can go to."

Harris said he understood why the Yahoo! account had been used for convenience and that the matter had been blown out of proportion by those who want to stop the neighborhood plan from going forward.

"What you have is some Lakeside residents working on the plan out of their kitchen," Harris said. "They don't have the luxury of an office, so they had to work on it from their homes and then come together at these meetings. With multiple people working on a plan, it's sometimes difficult to coordinate and make sure that they had the information correct from previous chapter to apply it to their section. I think they found a way to assist them through that process. It acted as a kind of a mini-server. Since the plan was so large and the committee members could not e-mail the plan back and forth they had to do it in bite sizes. All of it went on their public Web site after they had their public meetings and decided it was ready to be put on that website."

Harris also defended county planner Andrew Hagemeier's participation in the Yahoo! group, adding that Hagemeier had neither violated any policies and had not attempted to keep anything out of the public eye. Harris said he was aware that Hagemeier and members of the committee were using the Yahoo! account to transmit information but never suspected any wrongdoing.

"I have never for a minute thought that there was something subversive going on," Harris said. "There are a few people who are adamantly opposed to neighborhood plans in general and maybe specifically to the Lakeside plan, who are looking for things to disrupt the process. There are maybe five or six people who have complained about this. We have not even a handful of people who are complaining about that account to portray a process that has been very public as secretive in an attempt to hijack and sabotage the process. They're the same people that have caused problems in the process all along and tried to hijack public meetings."

Harris said he believed the revision process to have been legitimate, but added that it must also be defensible and that Smith had provided his council in the matter to help ensure the process would continue to be defensible.

Sue Hanson of the Bigfork Steering Committee also attended last Tuesday's meeting. Hanson praised LNPC member for their excellent in organization and level of involvement from the public.

"I'm amazed at what you have done in a short period of time," Hanson said. "I've been on the site and I'm impressed with your plan. One thing that I would like to see emphasized is the percentage of responses you got back from your survey. I've been told that a 10 percent return is good. Bigfork had 27 percent. You have 31 percent and that is outstanding.

"We've heard a lot of the nay-sayers, just like you're hearing," she said. They have every right to speak, but they are certainly the minority."