City, Flowers at odds over the way city handles access to council

By CHRIS PETERSON

Hungry Horse News

Columbia Falls Mayor Don Barnhart earlier this month spoke to an ongoing dispute between the city and Mayre Flowers of Citizens for a Better Flathead.

Flowers has been critical of the way the city allows the public to contact city council members. Under the city’s system, which has been in place for years, a person has to email city clerk Barb Staaland and then Staaland forwards the message to the respective party.

Flowers wants the ability to contact individual members of council on a one-on-one basis.

She notes that Flathead County Commissioners and other cities allow for a person to be contacted individually through email. They also have phone contacts through the respective governments.

For example, if one wants to email Kalispell Mayor Mark Johnson, he has an email address under the kalispell.com domain.

The county has a similar system.

Flowers claims Columbia Falls should have a similar system. But Barnhart and city councilmembers have been wary about ex parte communications, where they have a conversation or correspondence with a member of the public prior to taking an official action.

This has come up in past cases where developers, for example, were looking to talk to individual councilmembers before a vote on a project.

So the city set up its system, Barnhart maintained, to protect it from litigation. 

He also noted that Columbia Falls is smaller than the county, Kalispell and Whitefish. 

The Columbia Falls system, Barnhart noted “has worked perfectly until someone had to come in and start questioning how our city has run flawlessly for all these years ... (Flowers) wasn’t happy with it.”

But Flowers claimed previously that speaking to an individual councilmember is allowed, if it’s not an official matter before the board. It also doesn’t break open meetings laws as long as there isn’t a quorum.

Flowers has been lobbying the city for the past few months as a leader with the Coalition for a Clean CFAC, as that organization examines the cleanup of the now defunct aluminum plant outside the city limits.

The city isn’t obligated to set up an email system so people can reach councilmembers individually, according to Mike Meloy an attorney with the Montana Freedom of Information Hotline.

However, if they use their own personal emails for city business, then those emails must be revealed to the public, he noted.

He said it would behoove the city to set up its own email system, to avoid private email addresses of council being made public.

Emails communicated to a quorum are subject to open meetings laws, the FOIA hotline notes.

In Allen v. Lakeside Neighborhood Planning Committee, the Supreme Court warned: “(w)e therefore caution public officers that conducting official business via email can potentially expose them to claims of violation of open meetings laws.”

Emails aside, Barnhart said he’s always been available to the public. His number is the phone book for anyone to see, he noted.