Legality of Yucca meetings eyed

Stephen Curran

Tuesday, April 27, 2004 | 10:55 a.m.

The state attorney general's office is looking into whether a board studying a proposed railroad line from Caliente to Yucca Mountain may have broken state open-meeting laws by barring local residents and media from its meetings.

The Central Nevada Community Protection Planning Working Group, which uses federal money for Yucca Mountain oversight, includes members of the Caliente City Council and the Nye, Esmeralda and Lincoln county commissions.

It was formed earlier this year to allow the governments to cooperate in their dealings with the Energy Department. Meetings, so far, have excluded the public.

Kent Lauer, the executive director of the Nevada Press Association, a trade organization representing 41 newspapers, said the board disregarded the state's open-meeting laws.

"The so-called working group, made up almost entirely of elected officials, has no legal right whatsoever to close its meetings," Lauer said. "The group is not exempt from the open-meeting law."

Several members of the group last week characterized the panel's four meetings so far as "neither closed nor open."

Some of the governments represented in the group have talked about negotiating with the Energy Department to receive benefits from the Yucca Mountain project. In the past, Caliente's mayor and other elected officials in the three counties have shown support for the project.

At its last meeting last week at the Pahrump Community Library, the group allowed Pahrump residents Sally Devlin and Grant Hudlow to address the members, then asked them to leave, Devlin said.

A reporter for the Pahrump Valley Times newspaper was also asked to leave, and the Sun was told the meeting was closed.

The agenda for the meeting listed, among items to be discussed, the proposed rail line through Caliente to transport nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain and federal funding for the group.

Lawyers in the attorney general's office, unaware of the group's mission, were looking Monday into whether it broke the state's open-meeting laws.

The attorney general's office declined comment on the specifics of the case.

The state's open-meeting law requires all public bodies to meet openly, post agendas and publish minutes.

But the working group's agendas are e-mailed to members and are not publicly posted. No minutes, only "notes" of meeting business, are kept, one member said.

The law defines a public body as "any administrative, advisory, executive or legislative body of the state or a local government," which either spends or disburses taxpayer money or advises a government body that does.

In 1987, a judge ordered that meetings stay open unless there is a specific exception in the law to allow the public body to hold a closed meeting.

Tommy Rowe, chairman of the Lincoln County Commission and a member of the working group, defended the decision to keep residents out, saying that because the board makes no policy decisions and routinely travels to far-flung areas, it does not need to adhere to state open-meeting laws.

Barring the public from the meetings helps the gatherings run more smoothly, Rowe added, but he disputed claims that the meetings were held in secret.

"These are not secret meetings as the press has mentioned in the past. They're just not open to the public," he said. "The only reason they were closed was to keep people from interrupting the meeting."

Nye County Commissioner Candice Trummell said that because the group does not represent a quorum of any elected commission and does not vote on policy, it is not subject to the laws.

The group exists simply to discuss "matters of importance" relating to the Yucca Mountain project, Trummell said.

"We just do the work that needs to be done before we bring them to our respective jurisdictions," Trummell said. "This is only a working group and this working group has meetings that are not open to the general public.

"Nye County is very strict in its adherence to the open-meeting law."

Devlin, a 74-year-old retired business owner and self-described "hell-raiser" against the proposed nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain, regularly attends community meetings about the proposed rail line through Nye County.

She represented Citizen Alert, an anti-Yucca advocacy group, at the April 21 meeting.

"It's typical arrogance," Devlin said. "I don't like it, and I don't like them. It's not a nice situation."

Ace Robison, a consultant for Lincoln County who did not attend the April 21 meeting, declined to comment on the group's mission.

But a resolution passed in February stating the group's purpose says its members will "make recommendations on policy, impact mitigation and infrastructure."

So far the group has recommended to its various commissions and councils an emergency radio network to connect the rural agencies, Rowe said.

The group's role in advising on policy matters further underscores why its meetings were closed illegally, Lauer said.

"This group's desire for secrecy is why we have a law requiring open meetings by public boards," he said.