Editorial: A lingering dispute

Thursday, 04 March 2010 00:00

As a good politician and lawyer is prone to do, school board President Michael Gordon wants to get bogged down in semantics in order to refute The Ledger’s assertions about the district’s settlement, which included a financial transaction, with John Spang, the former schools business head who had sued the district for being fired. And in doing so, he may hope to obfuscate the issue enough so that the public will ignore the claims in last week’s editorial that the schools knowingly hid the spending of public money. They shouldn’t.

To begin with, Mr. Gordon’s denials are tenuous. At a public meeting last week, he said “nothing could be further from the truth” when describing The Ledger’s statement that the “confidentiality clause had been inserted ... at the insistence of the school district.” Yet, Mr. Gordon admitted the district requested the settlement be sealed — it was only the word “insistence” that drew his ire. So, if Mr. Spang had simply said no to the confidentiality agreement the district would have just removed it?

Mr. Gordon also refutes the statement that “every document related to the settlement has been sealed.” Yet, the few documents not sealed only indicate that settlement talks took place. They do not contain any information about the actual settlement nor even that one was reached.

And he disputes The Ledger’s claim that “in this case, the judge’s confidentiality ruling trumps the state’s law that prohibits public bodies from concealing payments of public money,” instead stating that there was no “judge’s order that would trump Freedom of Information Law.” However, expenditures of public money have to be made transparent in New York in all situations except when they are disclosed under certain circumstances in court. That’s because the Freedom of Information Law and Open Meetings Law do not apply to the courts, and the public access laws that do are waived when confidentiality clauses are included. Therefore, one of the only ways to have a transaction of public money kept secret is to have a judge approve sealing a settlement in a court case.

Two years ago, Robert Freeman, longtime executive director of the state’s Committee on Open Government, told The Ledger that a settlement “is clearly public,” stating that it is essentially a contract. And he described a judge sealing a settlement that included the spending of public money as “exceedingly rare.”

That being said, Katonah-Lewisboro is assuredly not the only district to seal a settlement, and Mr. Gordon, who has a good track record of transparency, now wants to have the confidentiality clause repealed. That’s a good move but it is hoped one that won’t be necessary in the future because the district has kept all its expenses public from the start.

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