Pay attention. This is how good ole boy city attorneys operate.
The paper alleges that the city attorney for Maitland contacted board officers by phone to relay the voting decisions reached by other officers. This is a major legal no-no in Florida when it comes to handling public business. If the organization that is the focus of this article meets the criteria for the Sunshine Law, the attorney would be considered a conduit. Though what punishment he would face is still unknown because that issue is currently being determined by a court.
This is an important issue that should have been resolved twenty years ago when another city attorney was doing the same thing, based on comments that I heard from several ex-commissioners who no longer had a reason to remain quiet. But back then, there was no agency in Florida that convinced anyone that they had the commitment and resolve to clean out these attorneys from the public sector. Quite the opposite. Crooked politicians gravitated to them, and one of these lawyers was even appointed to the Florida Ethics Committee. Imagine the message that sent to everyone.
I believe that attorneys are the major reason why Central Florida has fallen through the rabbit hole. Legal advice from these attorneys are as clear as mud and they leave too much for interpretation. If you can picture throwing a steak into a kennel of hungry dobermans and collies, you get a picture of the conflict this creates in a community.
Because these city attorneys are not consistently applying sound legal advice, our cities have been devolving into a state of anarchy as Libertarians and Republicans, who hate regulation, shout it out with boy scouts types who still have enough altruistic intentions to try to err on the side of the public. The boy scouts never win.
So I think it's high time that one of these city attorneys is getting challenged. It wouldn't be difficult to find the others, since their careers have criss-crossed over the years in the strangest of ways.
Here's the article that provoked this rant:
Years-long dispute over art center sparked Maitland 'Sunshine' case
In 2012, the council voted unanimously to pursue that opinion. But a letter to prosecutors from Dr. Marc Round, a Maitland resident and Frosch's husband, alleged that City Attorney Cliff Shepard telephoned Mayor Howard Schieferdecker, Councilman Ivan Valdes and Councilwoman Bev Reponen and secured a majority who agreed — without a public meeting or an official vote — that Shepard need not proceed with the opinion.
Those calls — and whether they violated open-meeting laws by obtaining a behind-the-scenes vote to negate the previous public vote — are at the center of the current investigation. Investigators are expected to question Schieferdecker, Valdes and Reponen.
Shepard has insisted he's done nothing wrong.
Cox says that, although the arts organization accepts public money, it is also funded by private donations and is not a public entity and not subject to the "Sunshine" laws. She points to a 2002 court case in which it was determined that United Arts of Central Florida is not subject to the law.
(Based on the article, 35% of the funds are public)
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/orange/os-maitland-arts-funding-sunshine-probe-20140929-story.html