Atomictumor

Hey folks,

In case you missed it, Anderson County Commissioner Myron Iwanski (Oak Ridge’s Eighth District) showed up on the ‘tumor to discuss this post regarding the closing of the doors for an hour or so at the first Anderson County Council meeting.  Here are his comments:

“…Here is my perspective. This issue goes back over 10 years. 5 years ago Clinton signed and agreement not to annex across the interstate. Without coming to the county to try to renegotiate, they simply violated the ageement and annexed anyway. We could have just let them violate, but we had no real choice except to take legal action. That is where we are with this today - in the courts.

Of course it wouldn’t be in the counties interest to discuss our legal options (ie., what are weakness and strenghts in the case and what are our chances of winning on each point) in an open meeting. Other government bodies, including our cities, do exectutive sessions routinely in legal matters. We take going into executive session very seriously and only do it if it is in the counties best interest and our legal coucil advises that we do it. In my 12 years on commission I don’t think we have used in more than 10 times, and most of those were for this issue.

In defense of our new commissioners, Clinton decided to wait until after the commission was in place to take this matter up again, so that is why the county law director brought it up at this meeting saying he needed direction on how to respond.

I expect this issue to be discussed in an open meeting in detail in the next month or two and each commissioner’s positon will be very clear as will the reason for any decision we make. Our case is weaker today than it was a year ago partly because the five year agreement is up but mostly because the state pulled the rug out from under us by changing the annexation laws (without our knowledge or opportunity to comment!)”

And he came back later with:

“We spent the entire meeting in open session except for the executive session to discuss this legal issue. We did the executive session as the last item of buisness and only talked about the Clinton Annexation lawsuit in the executive session.

After the executive session we went into open session so that if any commissioner wanted to take action base on the information the law director provided in the executive session they could make a motion and debate its merits in open session. After the executive session a motion was made and passed to release David Clark from the Rogers case since he cannot represent us. No one offered any other motions regarding the legal case, so we adjorned. I presume this is becase no one thought it was urgent enough to take action at this meeting.

This item was not on the agenda so no one knew it was going to come up. I do not think it would be fair to the public to take this important matter up without prior notice. I expect it to be on an agenda soon and voted on with an opportunity for public and commissiner comment in an open meeting.”

Which sums up his perspective of the meeting.  Frankly, the simple fact that he has the integrity to swing by the page to comment on a post like that goes a long way toward validating the situation.  I think it might have served appearances better to stage another time for the executive meeting, but given the circumstances, I think its understandable.

Myron, your comments are welcome here anytime.  Thanks for swinging by.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 6:48 am and is filed under Local, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.