Should School Board Members Be Reimbursed For Legal Fees Related to Electioneering Investigation?

During last Tuesday’s Park City School District meeting, the school board voted to reimburse its members for legal fees incurred while defending themselves against charges of electioneering during last Fall’s bond campaign. During the meeting, board member Nancy Garrison said, “it’s important that each of us know from these many months since several community members, in an effort to defeat the bond, made unsubstantiated accusation about board members that resulted in an enormous waste of tax payers, not taxpayers, but the state Attorney General’s office and county attorney’s office had to investigate claims that were found without basis and required us to hire legal council.”

Board member Phil Kaplan supported the reimbursement by saying that the law said that the school district had to reimburse board members for any charges, and that since the County Attorney found the issue was baseless, that it was even more imperative that school board members be reimbursed. School Board member Julie Eihausen said, “Being investigated for a criminal act was very difficult.”

During the bond election, I pushed hard that the school board should be investigated. There were two main issues that were brought up by the public. One was that school board members Nancy Garrison and Tanya Knauer made a video, at the High School, likely using school equipment, likely involving school personnel that some construed as pushing the bond. According to Utah Code: “Unless specifically required by law, and except as provided in Section 20A-11-1206, a public entity may not make an expenditure from public funds for political purposes or to influence a ballot proposition.” The second issue was that some students alleged, that during assemblies, school board members told students to have their parents vote for the bond.

Did these actions occur and did they violate the law? This is the entirety of the press release issued by the County Attorney’s office on the topic. “Summit County Attorney Robert Hilder has completed an investigation into citizen concerns regarding the school bond ballot proposition included on the November 2015 ballot. He has determined that there is no legal or factual basis to file charges against any elected or appointed officials.”

So, the County Attorney felt there was not a basis for filing charges. Fair enough. That doesn’t mean that there was not a basis for investigating the charges. These are serious accusations and I’m glad that the County Attorney took them seriously. We should be glad that we live in a system where there is judicial oversight and elected and appointed officials do have checks and balances.

So, lucky for citizens in Park City, our system both worked the way it should and the County Attorney found that no wrong-doing took place. Great.

Yet now we get to the school board’s decision to be reimbursed for hiring individual attorneys regarding the matter. It appears that Mr. Kaplan is right that Utah code says that public employees or officers will be reimbursed if they are indicted or charges are filed against the person and the charges are dismissed are quashed. The question I’ve had since I heard about the reimbursement is why they didn’t wait until they were formally charged to hire attorneys. Now reading the Utah Code, what I really wonder is if these fees are really reimbursable per the law, since they were not even charged?

I also found a response to a question by school board members during an interview on KPCW a little self-serving. KPCW asked the school board members, “Does this [being investigated] have a chilling effect for someone who wants to be on the school board?” The curt response was, “I don’t know, I would think so.” However, also keep in mind, that the anti-bond people also thought they were being investigated by the County Attorney for passing out material outside of Ecker Hill School during a bond presentation. Whether they ultimately were being investigated wasn’t addressed in the County Attorney’s press release. However, I know some of the members were concerned. Does that have a chilling effect on free speech?

The truth is that public service is messy.