Last September, a former vice mayor of Meeker filed a complaint claiming the Town’s Board of Trustees had violated the law.
Cheryl Buoy, who had been removed from her vice mayor position on the board, asked three agencies to investigate including the District Attorney, the Meeker Police Department and the Sheriff’s Office.
The DA’s office reportedly has been conducting the probe. Eight months later, the status of the investigation is anybody’s guess.
Buoy believed Trustees violated the law by having a pre-meeting and violating the Open Meeting Act.
She also asked the agencies to determine if the full due process of the law occurred with regards to her removal from her position on the board.
The board had removed her from office last August because she didn’t attend a class within a year of her initial appointment to the Town Board as required by law.
Despite efforts to obtain that information over the past few months, particularly for the past several weeks, District Attorney Allan Grubb doesn’t want to respond.
His Public Information person Neal Davis has been asked the status of the case, but he hasn’t had any luck finding out from Grubb.
This not a huge felony investigation. This is about determining if the Open Meeting law was violated and if matters that should have been discussed in open meetings were talked about privately.
Why the DA cannot reveal the status or provide a timeline of when the investigation might be completed makes no sense. Especially when he attended a meeting he later questioned.
In an interview two days after Grubb actually attended that Monday evening meeting last Aug. 19, he asked, “Why do we have an Open Meeting Act and they hold a pre-meeting with a quorum before the scheduled meeting and discuss town issues with no notice”?
In that interview Grubb said he believed a pre-meeting the Meeker Town Board held that evening was illegal.
Grubb questioned, “If they are going to start before the announced time, the posted time that was part of the agenda, how do they meet as a Town Board when everybody on the board just violated the law”?
He asked, “Why would they do that”? “What they did is a violation of the common
“What they did is a violation of the common sense of the law,” he continued.
He emphasized in the interview, “I’m against public corruption in any form and intentionally violating the law in your official duties as a public officer is public corruption. The discussions are made to be public, that is why we have the law.”
It’s time for the DA to provide to the public and those under investigation a timeline. They deserve that.
He may hope people will forget about this and it will go away.
Trust us, it won’t.