‘The way you run this meeting is disgusting’

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

The Bonner County board of commissioners’ regular business meeting came to several abrupt halts on Jan. 9, as Chair Luke Omodt called for five separate recesses ranging from five minutes to two hours long. The consistent disruptions stemmed from Omodt’s and Commissioner Steve Bradshaw’s continued refusal to second any of Commissioner Asia Williams’ motions.

At the request of various members of the public, Williams added eight items to Tuesday’s agenda, including those in which she proposed moving the public comment section back to the beginning of the meeting but cutting it off at 10 a.m.; once again allowing public comment on each agendized item; allowing public comment on all items agendized by the commissioners; updating an organizational chart to reflect which departments and committees liaison with which commissioners; and requiring that commissioners present updates on the departments and committees that they liaise with during their commissioner reports.

All five motions died without a second or deliberation.

Commissioner Asia Williams hosts an impromptu community workshop with her own microphone during the meeting’s first recess. Photo by Soncirey Mitchell.

For her sixth action item, Williams motioned “to send out an RFP [request for proposal] for a forensic fair audit with a start date prior to 2023, recommended by an external auditor that has not had a prior relationship with Bonner County Fair for the purposes of auditing.” 

Omodt seconded the motion to advance it for discussion.

“Where are the funds budgeted for this forensic audit? It is my understanding that the Office of the Prosecutor spent approximately $40,000 with — I believe it was — Swan Investigation Services [Christopher Swan Private Investigator at Resolve Investigations LLC] on a similar one,” said Omodt before moving to postpone William’s motion indefinitely, thereby attempting to end the discussion.

Omodt maintains that it’s the board’s duty to handle the audit, rather than other county agencies.

“The Sheriff and Prosecutor’s offices’ continued intrusion into the county audit lack authority. The BOCC will do our job and they should do theirs in accordance with Idaho law,” Omodt told the Reader in a Jan. 10 email. Williams did not respond to a request for further comment by press time.

Williams continued the deliberation while speaking over Omodt.

“I’d actually like to ask you publicly,” said Williams, addressing Omodt. “You wrote a letter on Dec. 4, before a decision was made by this board, and you have been asked multiple times, ‘You wrote a letter to an external auditor [Moscow-based accounting firm Hayden Ross], did you receive legal input, and if so, by whom?’” 

She went on to claim that the letter “wasn’t approved” by the BOCC’s legal counsel. What’s more, in her opinion a complete forensic audit is necessary to provide a longer-term review of the fairgrounds’ financial statements. Anything less than that, she argued, would be inadequate.

“Why are there people saying that they ‘want an audit, but not really’? That’s a problem,” Williams said. 

The board voted Dec. 12 to draft a letter to Hayden Ross, at the firm’s request, to correct alleged misinformation about the Bonner County Fairgrounds’ financials, which the Fair Board published in an Oct. 16 press release. The letter was intended to clarify that the county had not audited the fairgrounds’ operations in the past, but an independent auditor would include the most recent year’s expenses in the county’s FY’23 statement.

Omodt did not give Williams an explicit answer and instead called again for the vote.

“I’m going to make this meeting not reasonable if you continue,” said Williams. “We’re going to deliberate, so you deliberate or you recess and the community has a workshop on why two board members don’t want a forensic audit of money that we can say is missing — between $40,000 and $200,000 — because of an objective opinion.”

Omodt continued to call for a vote, at which point Williams produced an additional, louder microphone from beneath the table where the board sat and continued to talk over her fellow commissioners. 

The motion to postpone indefinitely passed despite the fact that Williams used her new microphone to open the meeting to public comment.

After only 26 minutes, Omodt called for a recess until 11 a.m. — the scheduled time for the board’s executive session — and he and Bradshaw left the meeting room, at which time Williams continued to host an impromptu community workshop.

Williams, Prosecutor Louis Marshall, Deputy Prosecutor Bill Wilson and members of the public used the recess to discuss a variety of legal questions, the issue of public comment during business meetings, the continuation of commissioner reports, criticisms of local media and future topics for Williams’ pre-business meeting “Commissioner Chats.”

The meeting resumed, then immediately went into a five-minute recess, followed by an executive session, after which it went back into session. Continuing with the agenda, Williams’ seventh motion to stream meetings on Zoom and YouTube during breaks and recesses died without a second. Her eighth motion to archive all responses to public records requests on the county’s website met the same fate, despite the fact that legal counsel “gave their opinion that once they release an item to a member of the public there isn’t a reason that it could not be archived online,” according to Williams.

Omodt brought forward the final action items, including his motion to strike commissioner reports from all meetings, which was seconded by Bradshaw. Both commissioners indicated that they did not believe the reports related to the business of Bonner County.

“The issue about the district report is not because I’m not talking about the business of Bonner County, it’s because the two of you are not talking about the business of Bonner County,” said Williams, who had instituted commissioner reports.

“Just like every single thing this board votes [in] the majority to take away, what do I do? I reinvent it, rewrap it and it becomes amazing. You took public comment away, look how many Commissioner Chats we have. Look how many agencies that participate. Look how much more community involvement you have,” said Williams.

She requested that Omodt and Bradshaw remove their own reports from future agendas, rather than striking the concept altogether.

“Let me have my little five minutes and we don’t have to talk very long about things unnecessarily, just because you want to avoid a report that I am still going to give — just going to call it something else,” she said. 

Williams stated that she will schedule her commissioner report under a different name each meeting going forward.

Omodt’s motion to eliminate commissioner reports passed with Williams dissenting. Omodt ended the action portion of the meeting by discussing the Civil Litigation Fund, which the board uses to pay all related bills. Omodt therefore moved that “all claims and bills from account 03471, lines 7100 through 7200 [from the Civil Litigation Fund] be submitted to the board of county commissioners for bill review, prior to the disbursement of funds, and to direct the risk manager to compile a comprehensive report for all Fiscal Year ’23 claims and expenses from these lines.”

Omodt further explained his motion in a Jan. 10 email to the Reader.

“The BOCC is responsible for the control of all suits and payments of claims against the county. It is our statutory responsibility to have oversight of where taxpayer dollars are being spent. It’s wrong when elected officials use taxpayer funds without statutory authority,” he wrote.

During the Jan. 9 meeting, Omodt refused to answer Williams’ repeated requests to know if legal counsel approved his motion, and instead called for a vote.

“One of the consequences of this meeting is it will be deemed that you didn’t deliberate and she [Williams] asked a question, therefore everything is invalid. This was a very long day and we don’t want to redo it,” said Williams.

Omodt’s motion to funnel all civil litigation bills through the board passed with Williams stating, “I’m not voting and you don’t get to bypass my vote,” which her fellow commissioners interpreted as an abstention, despite Williams’ insistence that it was not. It was unclear by press time how the official record would reflect her vote.

Omodt attempted to transition into the public comment portion of the meeting — bypassing the agendized commissioner reports in light of his previous motion. Williams insisted that his motion would only take effect during the next business meeting, but was cut off when Omodt called for a two-hour recess.

The meeting resumed in order to take public comment, then broke for a five-minute recess, resumed again, then broke again and resumed a final time to allow the board to enter into another executive session.

“I don’t accept this constant idea of pushing the public out because you [Omodt] don’t like that they don’t like the way that you look at them, the way you stare at them, the way you try to dress them down and you do — and have — used rude, disrespectful language to members of the public while sitting here demanding that they treat you better than you deserve to be treated in these meetings,” said Williams, adding, “The way you run this meeting is disgusting.”