Park County commissioners held a spirited discussion last month about whether to turn the county’s custodial services over to a private contractor.

But, according to some county officials, the public should never have been allowed to hear the debate.

“We should have discussed it in executive session and decided whether we wanted to proceed or not,” Commission Chairman Joe Tilden said in an interview last week. “By doing it out in the open, in the public eye, … it just caused an awful lot of unrest throughout the entire county.”

Commissioners decided on Feb. 18 to stick with county custodians, with Commissioner Lloyd Thiel being the only one to favor privatization at this time. Had the discussion been handled behind closed doors, “I think we could have handled it and nobody’d had ever known about it to begin with,” Tilden said.

Commissioner Jake Fulkerson and Clerk Colleen Renner also argued last month that the idea should not have been discussed in public.

However, had commissioners kept their deliberations secret, they may have violated Wyoming’s open meetings laws. Cheyenne attorney Bruce Moats — an expert on Wyoming’s open government laws who often represents media organizations in fights over public meetings and records — said Park County commissioners were required to hold the discussion in public.

“The commissioners could not go into executive session to decide if they wanted to privatize the custodial work,” Moats said in an email to the Tribune.

Whether the discussion should have been kept quiet was just one wrinkle in a charged internal debate.

‘Employees scared to death’

Commissioner Thiel drove the entire discussion. He began exploring the possibility of privatizing the custodial work last summer. After the idea was not considered by a county committee looking at ways to cut expenses and raise revenues, Thiel raised the concept publicly at a budget work session in January, catching his colleagues off-guard.

Thiel described the proposal as generally transferring the county’s 15 custodians to a private company, but it was unclear as to how many of the employees would ultimately be kept on with a contractor and how their compensation might be affected.

The uncertainty caused immediate angst among county workers. One custodian left for another job; the adult son of another custodian told the Tribune he planned to launch a petition and picket outside the Park County Courthouse.

In the meantime, at Thiel’s request, two private cleaning companies provided estimates indicating that they could save the county tens of thousands of dollars if they took over the custodial work.

However, at a Feb. 18 work session, commissioners opted to not pursue the possibility any further for now. They generally argued that privatization was too dramatic a step, too soon, and that the savings were too uncertain.

Commissioners and other county officials also bemoaned the unease that the spectre of privatization had created.

“I think we’ve got our employees scared to death, in all honesty,” County Treasurer Barb Poley said at the work session. “They’re talking about it every day because of all this stuff going on, and we’re probably going to lose some employees over this.”

Thiel stood by his belief that there are savings to be found in the “overstaffed” custodial department, but also asked what he could have done differently to avoid “this turmoil.”

That’s when Commissioner Fulkerson argued that the entire concept should have been explored in executive session, hidden from public view, “so we don’t get everybody all upset and put all these jobs on the table.”

“When you’re talking about 17 lives, why put them all through the wringer when we don’t even know what we’re doing?” Fulkerson said.

County Clerk Colleen Renner agreed.

“It should have all been done in executive session, where you’re putting people’s lives out on the line and you’re putting it out to the general public that we’re thinking we’re going to do this and this is going to lose this,” Renner said.

Renner said that, if the county had a human resources department, the county could have “earned heartache” from discussing the idea publicly.

Tilden echoed that view in a later interview, saying the deliberations should have been in executive session “because it did have to do with personnel.”

However, Wyoming’s laws on government meetings — which generally require meetings to be open to the public — do not allow officials to meet in secret just because the topic involves personnel.

Meetings presumed to be open

The section of the law relating to employee issues says a governing body like a commission can only enter executive session if they’re going to “consider the appointment, employment, right to practice or dismissal of a public officer, professional person or employee.”

Moats, the attorney, said the law allows a closed session “when a specific individual’s (or individuals’) right to employment is discussed. But a policy decision as to whether to privatize the custodial work must be held in open session.”

For instance, Moats said commissioners must publicly discuss how many positions they want to cut, but could enter executive session to decide who is terminated and who stays.

“An executive session to discuss eliminating positions, as opposed to the qualifications, etc., of an individual holding those positions, must be held in open session,” Moats said.

Commissioner Tilden said in an interview that he would have sought Park County Attorney Bryan Skoric’s opinion before holding the discussion in executive session, “but I think it would have been OK.”

For his part, Skoric said he wasn’t sure whether the discussion about contracting out the custodial services would qualify.

“I think it is presumed that all meetings should be open unless otherwise allowed,” he said, “and whether that would be a proper reason for executive session, certainly I’d like some time to research it.”

Beyond the law, Moats argued that “a governing body is kidding itself if it thinks it could keep something like that secret.” And if commissioners made the decision in secret, “while giving the employees and public no opportunity to weigh in on the decision, just [imagine] the firestorm that would create,” Moats said. “It is, in the end, a difficult topic that is not going to be made easy by secrecy.”

Commissioner Thiel was similarly skeptical about the feasibility of keeping the proposal a secret.

“People talk,” he said at last month’s work session.

In a later interview, Thiel said he feels the commission does too much business behind closed doors.

“We try and be as transparent as possible,” Chairman Tilden said in an interview, but “when you are talking about people’s lives, sometimes you have to ... discuss things behind closed doors.”

Tilden — who was the board’s most outspoken opponent of outsourcing the custodial work — also made clear at last month’s meeting that he did not want to discuss the topic further, in executive session or otherwise.

“If you don’t have two commissioners [supporting the idea], it’s never going on the agenda,” the chairman vowed to his colleagues. “I mean that most sincerely.”

When Thiel was the only commissioner to support discussing the idea further, Tilden announced that “it ain’t going.”