A closed-door North Shore School District 112 board meeting that violated the Illinois Open Meetings Act was mostly spent discussing millions of dollars in architectural fees for referendum projects, an audio recording reveals.
No time was spent during the 49-minute closed meeting on Feb. 16, 2016 discussing collective bargaining negotiations or litigation — two of the three reasons cited as grounds for closing the meeting to the public.
About two minutes were spent on personnel matters involving specific employees, a permissible use of closed session, according to the Illinois Attorney General’s office, which reviewed a complete verbatim recording of the meeting.
To remedy the infraction, the Highland Park-based school district made 46 minutes of the meeting public by releasing the audio recording to anyone filing a Freedom of Information Act request. The district also released the minutes of the meeting. However, the minutes say only that the board discussed negotiations when referring to the portion of the meeting that violated the law.
The conversation heard on the audio recording mostly involved the school district’s fee negotiations with architectural firm Nagle Hartray and construction manager Gilbane Building Company for work on a proposed middle school campus and renovations to six existing school buildings.
Discussions regarding fees paid to architects and other consultants are not among the permitted reasons for closing a meeting under state law. The Open Meetings Act also requires that the exceptions be strictly construed.
In a March 15 letter of determination, Assistant Attorney General Edie Steinberg found the school board violated the Open Meetings Act because all but two minutes were spent on topics outside the scope of the reasons cited for closing the meeting.
Co-interim superintendents Ed Rafferty and Jane Westerhold, who started in February of this year and were not involved in the meeting, said it’s their understanding the violation stemmed from a genuine misunderstanding regarding the negotiations exception.
It’s not clear why District 112 administrators and school board members thought the negotiations exception for collective bargaining with employee groups also applied to outside consultants.
Since 2012, school board members and other elected and appointed officials have been required to complete online training on the requirements of the open meetings act.
The meeting took place about a month before the district’s failed referendum asking voters to authorize $198 million in borrowing to finance a middle school in southwest Highland Park and renovations at the six schools that would serve elementary students.
The main topic was a proposed fee structure for compensating the district’s architects on the referendum construction projects. Mohsin Dada, the district’s chief financial officer at the time, said Nagle Hartray had written $15.7 million in architectural and engineering fees into the project budget and “we know that’s high.”
Board members’ comments reflected a desire to lower the costs to taxpayers but not risk losing the architectural firm, which had been working with the district since mid 2014 and was very familiar with the schools. Board member Jane Solmor-Mordini brought up the hours and days spent interviewing architectural firms and noted that “we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot” if the district had to start over.
“My expectation is that we have room for negotiation,” Dada said, of the firm’s proposal.
“This is a negotiating position,” observed board member Yumi Ross, an architect. “They couldn’t possibly hope to get that. I have no problem pushing as hard as we can.”
When board members inquired about the costs of changing architects if negotiations fell apart, Ross said, “A new architect would have to get up to speed, but we don’t have a building yet. We have a diagram.”
Later, she expressed the view that using different architects for the elementary school work and the middle school campus would produce the highest quality results on both fronts.
“Introducing another architect is going to keep them on their toes,” Ross said. “They will keep each other honest and more competitive. They will each work hard. They don’t want to be the architect with cost overruns.”
Board members backed the administration’s suggestion to set architects’ fees at 5.5 percent of construction costs for the new middle school construction, and 7.25 percent for the renovation work.
The board also discussed whether to add $5,000 to the $50,000 flat fee the district was paying to a project manager who’d been brought on the previous fall.
Several board members did not wish to commit more money before the outcome of the referendum was known.
“He is asking for a long-term deal at this point, and we are not ready to make that deal,” said Board President Michael Cohn.
Others questioned quibbling over $5,000.
“We lowball people to the point where they feel disrespected,” Solmor-Mordini said.
Noted Ross, “If you are going to have this amount of outrage over $5,000, please channel that outrage toward the (architects’) fees, toward the larger picture.”
Several officials instrumental in convening the closed meeting have since resigned. Dada left the district at the end of the 2016 school year while Superintendent Michael Bregy and Cohn, the board president, both resigned in January. Three board members who participated in the meeting have either resigned or will be stepping down after the April 4 election.
The meeting was one of two closed sessions that Highland Park attorney Robert Bernat asked the Illinois Attorney General’s office to review in April of 2016. He asked for a review of a closed session held on Dec. 15, 2015, the night the school board voted to put the $198 million referendum on the ballot. The Illinois Attorney General’s office declined to review the meeting because more than 60 days had lapsed and there was nothing to indicate Bernat had more recently learned of a violation.
Bernat also asked for a review of the closed session held before the school board’s vote to close schools if the referendum failed. While Steinberg concluded the school board did not discuss the school closing plan, she found the meeting an improper use of closed session.
The audio recording revealed the conversation turned at one point to an upcoming Tribune article that was expected to focus on a legislative maneuver the district had used to lift its cap on borrowing for the upcoming referendum. Then-superintendent Bregy interrupted the dialogue to say the news story was not a closed meeting topic. The conversation quickly turned back to architectural fees.
Twitter @KarenABerkowitz
