Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Is the city of Kuna looking for a new city hall?

Kuna City Council members went into an executive session last week to discuss potential property acquisition.
The original posted agenda for the April 7 City Council meeting stated only that City Council was going into executive session to discuss potential litigation. But then when it came time for the executive session portion of the meeting, Kuna Mayor Scott Dowdy announced that they needed to add an item to the agenda to also discuss potential property acquisition.
A couple of dozen people were originally in attendance at the meeting but left after the consent agenda was approved. The mayor requested to add the agenda item only after everyone left the meeting.
I had to inform the mayor and council that in order to add an agenda item, a motion was required to add the item, including a statement of the good-faith reason that the item was not placed on the original agenda. Idaho Code 67-2343, Paragraph (4), section (c): “An agenda may be amended after the start of a meeting upon a motion that states the reason for the amendment and states the good faith reason the agenda item was not included in the original agenda posting.”
Readers of this column are aware of past indiscretions by this council in what I consider abuses of executive session. Last year, the council spent a couple of hours in executive session to spend $1 million out of the sewer fund to buy 107 acres for a park, then earlier this year, council went into executive session to agree to spend $1.3 million toward the local improvement district that’s funding the new wastewater treatment plant.
So here we go again. I would think the city would know better by now.

You can read the rest of this opinion in this week's Kuna Melba News.

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