Left to right: VPT board members Patricia Sabalis, Tom Pelletier and Lorilee Lawton
As we reported in this week’s Fair Game, Vermont Public Television is facing a Corporation for Public Broadcasting investigation into whether the station’s board of directors violated federal open meetings law.
On Friday, the chairman of the VPT board’s audit committee, Tom Pelletier, said that a preliminary review conducted by his panel found that the board has, indeed, held closed-door meetings. Pelletier announced the findings at an audit committee meeting held at the station’s Colchester headquarters.
“VPT’s preliminary review indicates that the VPT board has, from time to time, held conference calls or committee meetings that were not open to the public, in order to address various personnel matters,” said Pelletier, who is president and CEO of Northfield Bank. “These meetings were conducted internally because VPT, like many organizations, does not publicly discuss personnel matters.”
While such closed-door meetings are permissible if properly warned and documented, Pelletier acknowledged that VPT’s board did not always follow proper procedure.
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On the one hand this sounds like dry procedural errors, on the other the VPT “staff members” seem to be in mutiny, calling for ” the board’s leadership to resign”. There must be more going on here than what we currently know.
I wonder exactly what those ‘personnel matters’ were. Any boards I’ve been on were extra-careful to follow procedure if anything remotely controversial came up, especially if it came to staff or volunteers.