The Mississippi Supreme Court has granted The Dispatch’s motion of substitution in an ongoing open meetings complaint case against the city of Columbus.
Former Dispatch reporter Nathan Gregory filed the original complaint in his name in 2014. The ruling allows The Commercial Dispatch to become the appellee in the case and removes Gregory — who has not worked for the newspaper since December 2014 — as a party.
Gregory filed his complaint to the Mississippi Ethics Commission after two occasions when Mayor Robert Smith scheduled meetings with two to three councilmen each (less than a quorum of the six-person body) behind closed doors to discuss the same issue. Once, the separate meetings of three centered on an issue involving the Golden Triangle Development LINK. The other pair of non-quorum meetings resulted in a press release stating the city had decided to be its own contractor for Trotter Convention Center renovations.
The city argued the meetings were “gatherings” in order to share information that would later be presented to the council at a public meeting.
Since the gatherings were not “meetings” as defined by the Open Meetings Act, the public could be excluded, the city argued. City Attorney Jeff Turnage argued to the Ethics Commission the city had “circumvented” the law in that case but had not broken it.
Both the Ethics Commission and Lowndes County Chancery Judge Kenneth Burns found the city violated the Open Meetings Act in Gregory’s complaint. That case is pending before the Mississippi Supreme Court, after the city appealed both the commission’s and Burns’ rulings.
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