Council's "Kraft Defense" Doesn't Wash

The Wisconsin Department of Justice will not prosecute six members of the Oshkosh Common Council for going into an illegal closed meeting because they were acting on the advice of the City Attorney Warren Kraft. The DOJ report says: "Here, several Council members contacted the City Attorney, who advised every member prior to the meeting that that a closed session was justifed. Though he arrived 15 minutes after it started, the City Attorney also attended the closed session. His attendance and failure to object to the substance or scope of any part of the closed session is further support that he endorsed it."

For the six Councilors to resort to the "Kraft Defense" (i.e. "We were only following the City Attorney's advice.") is crafty, but just doesn't wash. When we elect people to the Council, we should be able to expect that they are capable of comprehending the plain language of the state statutes governing open meetings. We should also expect that they will act independently and according to their own conscience, especially when millions of tax dollars are involved. In the case of the February 14th closed meeting, the impropriety was so clear that the Councilors should not even have had to ask for Kraft's advice before refusing to attend. Or at the very least, they should have listened to the citizens who warned them of the probable violation of law that would take place should they attend, and ask Kraft to solicit advice from the AG's office before proceeding.

As noted in today's Northwestern coverage of the open meetings violation, this was not the first time Mr. Kraft has given the Council bad advice:

Councilor Paul Esslinger, the only member of the board who protested the meeting and did not attend, said he believed Kraft should apologize to the public.

"I'm concerned that our own city attorney couldn't see that we should not have had that meeting to begin with," Esslinger said.

. . .

Esslinger said he felt his protest of the meeting was appropriate at the time based on the issues Palmeri, Hentz and The Northwestern raised at the time of the meeting. But he also was concerned that this is the second ruling against the city's practices by the attorney general's office.

"The other one was not bidding out the bathrooms (at Leach Amphitheater)," Esslinger said. "And when you have two such transgressions in two years, that's troubling."