Source: http://elighthouse.isolon.org/capital-kills-story-on-fraudulent-claims-concerning-sbac-appointment-credentials
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 16:34:22+00:00

Document:
After my Nov. 27 op-ed concerning the fraudulent claims made by AACPS and SBAC senior officials concerning their letters of appointment to the SBAC, the Capital informed me that it was launching an investigation into the matter. I should have gotten the message that it really had no intention of conducting a serious investigation when at the SBAC meeting later that day I saw the Capital reporter (a rare sighting at an SBAC meeting) acting in a coquettish manner with Bob Mosier, who is both the AACPS Public Information Officer and SBAC Chief Administrator, and then a few seconds later giving me a stone-cold, condescending look.
Schools spokesman Bob Mosier provided emails between the various groups tasked with selecting commission members and himself, in which officials conveyed their appointment for each spot on the commission. He said the appointment of CRASC representative Josie Urrea was communicated verbally.
This paragraph repeated fraudulent claims by the PIO officer. But the reporter chose to report the PIO Officer’s claims at face value and without seeking a reaction quote from me. The reporter and Capital editor later acknowledged that the claim the PIO officer made concerning the appointments–and endorsed by the SBAC’s Chair–was incorrect. But they made no correction in what is widely considered to be Anne Arundel County’s newspaper of record.
After the Capital ascertained that the PIO Officer’s claims, as reported in the Capital, were incorrect, it accepted a new argument–proposed by whom I do not know–to move the goal posts. According to the new argument, written letters of appointment weren’t needed. Verbal appointments were adequate. Left unsaid with this new line of argument was who made those verbal appointments and on what basis were they legally qualified to make such appointments. The fact that both AACPS and SBAC officials were willing to mislead about the written appointment letters suggest that they are actually dubious about this verbal appointment theory. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that that some person is legally qualified to make such verbal appointments and that such verbal appointments were made. The public should still be able to know who is exercising such power, Wizard of Oz like, behind the curtain.
My heart goes out to all Capital education reporters who are dependent on a good working relationship with AACPS PIO Officer Bob Mosier in order to meet their news quota and retain their jobs. To an extent very different from reporters covering either the County Council or General Assembly, the Capital education reporter is dependent on the goodwill of a single source, the AACPS PIO officer, to retain her job. That has meant that Capital education reporters have had no practical choice but to give Mosier the last word, which for more than a decade they have routinely done.
Fortunately, other reporters at the Capital lack a similar dependence, so this creates a countervailing force when ACCPS and SBAC officials intersect with Capital reporters on other news beats (for an example, see here). But this is like expecting accurate coverage of Maryland’s Governor only when he visits foreign capitals and intersects with the beats of foreign journalists.
Copied below is my written correspondence with the Capital on this issue. Not included are calls with the education reporter and editor-in-chief. The emails that were provided to the Capital and presumably referenced in the Capital’s news report are copied here.
I have already provided you with enough information, plus some calls by you for reaction quotes, for you to run a story. So you must not like the story. We’ll see.
Yes, we have for the time being. It’s something I plan to look at as time allows between now and the next SBAC meeting, which I imagine will take place some time in January.
(a) In general. — Every auditor, clerk, sheriff, constable, commissioner, surveyor, or other officer before he assumes the duties of his office, shall take and sign the oath or affirmation prescribed by the Constitution.
HISTORY: An. Code 1957, art. 16, § 6; art. 26, §§ 14, 153, 154; art. 70, §§ 2, 4, 7, 13; art. 87, § 1; 1973, 1st Sp. Sess., ch. 2, § 1; 1980, ch. 712, § 2; 1982, ch. 820, § 3; 1985, ch. 303; 1987, ch. 167; 2003, ch. 427; 2004, chs. 25, 183; 2006, ch. 44, § 6.
This doesn’t seem to add anything substantive to the Maryland Constitution provision in Article I. But I felt like something like this had to exist. Still missing are the detailed implementation guidelines, assuming they exist (a big if).
Just had what I considered to be a pretty bizarre call with the County Clerk’s office.
According to Assistant Chief Deputy Douglas Arnold, his office has no statutory or regulatory guidance in implementing their official responsibilities with regard to appointments and the taking of oaths. He suggested I seek AG guidance on the implementation of the law regarding the Clerk’s office but then also couldn’t tell me who was the AG official responsible for providing such guidance. He also confirmed that the Clerk hadn’t been involved with the appointments to the SBAC.
When I mentioned that the Constitution provided a framework for the operation of his office, he agreed. I then told him I never heard of a constitutional provision that wasn’t implemented with more detailed statutory and regulatory guidance. He insisted that if such guidance existed he didn’t know about it. He also reminded me his office was an administrative, not legal, office.
I then asked to speak with Robert Duckworth, who I figured must know the laws under which his office operates. I was told that Duckworth wasn’t available, so I left a message for him to call me. I doubt he will.
I’m responding to your four questions below, but not in the order you asked them.
1. Why should the public care about this due process? Why isn’t an email good enough?
In a representative democracy, there is a moment of magic when one is transformed from an ordinary citizen to a representative of other citizens. That moment of magic consists of two sub-moments (or stages) for most offices: 1) an official appointment, and 2) an oath of office. We generally have strict rules concerning when someone is or is not a representative because it is such an important transformation.
Here I’ll point you to two sources: Maryland’s State Constitution and Clerk of the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County. These sources aren’t exhaustive but they should get you started.
SEC. 10. Any officer elected or appointed in pursuance of the provisions of this Constitution, may qualify, either according to the existing provisions of law, in relation to officers under the present Constitution, or before the Governor of the State, or before any Clerk of any Court of Record in any part of the State; but in case an officer shall qualify out of the County in which he resides, an official copy of his oath shall be filed and recorded in the Clerk’s office of the Circuit Court of the County in which he may reside, or in the Clerk’s office of the Superior Court of the City of Baltimore, if he shall reside therein. All words or phrases, used in creating public offices and positions under the Constitution and laws of this State, which denote the masculine gender shall be construed to include the feminine gender, unless the contrary intention is specifically expressed (transferred from Article XV, sec. 10, by Chapter 681, Acts of 1977, ratified Nov. 7, 1978. As Art. XV, sec. 10, it was amended by Chapter 275, Acts of 1922, ratified Nov. 7, 1922).
Generally, when Steve Schuh makes an appointment to a commission, it goes through the County Clerk’s office. The Clerk gets a letter and then swears the individual into office. All you have to do is look at the County Clerk’s appointments book to see if this was done with regard to the SBAC. I don’t believe it was—and not only for the stakeholders, but also the County Executive’s appointees. The excuse might be that this is a new body and it takes a while for such systems to get into place. But I wouldn’t accept that as a reasonable excuse.
Note the critical importance of an independent branch of government certifying the appointment. This avoids the types of record keeping shenanigans routinely played by the school board selection commission. The formal appointment process, administered by a competing branch of government, is an essential feature of our checks & balances system of government.
I should also point out that the importance of formal appointment is not limited to government. Every job I’ve ever gotten has included a formal appointment letter. I would imagine that the Capital also does that when it hires a reporter. Perhaps there are some exceptions in the private sector. Regardless, care for due process should be greater in the public sector where there is less accountability based on substantive outcomes.
2. What specifically is wrong with the appointment process for SBAC members?
We need to separate two classes of appointments: appointments by an elected official and appointments by stakeholders. In the past, Governor Hogan (and O’Malley before him) sent official letters of appointment to his appointees. Chair Kipke claims she also got a letter of appointment from County Executive Schuh, but now she says she threw it away and cannot find it.
Please be aware that this is not an appointment to an advisory committee. It is an appointment to an extraordinarily powerful body responsible for spending more than 50% of the County budget ($1+ billion), managing 10,000+ employees, and 80,000+ students. There has been a tendency to treat the SBAC as some type of insignificant advisory body; it is not.
The situation with the stakeholder representatives is different and more confusing. Partly this is due to its extraordinary status. While stakeholder appointments are hardly unusual, they are almost always to advisory bodies. A major apparent exception which proves the rule upon close examination is the judicial nominating commission. The critical difference is that that was created under executive order rather than statute. The Governor is under no obligation to follow the commission’s recommendations and can keep asking for more; I believe he can also rescind the executive order creating the commission or the commission’s terms. The SBAC is a very different and vastly more powerful beast.
Anyway, my long-winded point here is that the SBAC’s stakeholder powers are an anomaly, not in any way something routine.
3. What would you consider an appropriate due process for an appointment (I know you said to look to Klasmeier’s appointment as a guide)?
Both the County Executive’s Office and the Stakeholder groups would send appointment letters to Robert Duckworth at the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County.
The Clerk would swear them into office.
The Clerk would enter their names into his written registry.
Within the stakeholder groups, I’d add an extra layer of due process. This is an important enough public office that it should be made at board level. That was the way it was done at the Community College. The Community College’s trustees got together and formally made the appointment. In contrast, the special ed representative merely appointed herself. As for the CRASC representative, who knows what really went on. Even a rinky-dink civic association is usually more transparent in its decision-making processes than CRASC, which is not subject to Maryland’s right-to-know laws.
4. HB 716 doesn’t establish parameters for SBAC appointments. Do you consider this an oversight, or is it that most bodies adhere to an established due process for appointments, even if one isn’t built into the law?
My guess is that HB716 didn’t establish parameters partly because the legislature likes to pretend that the SBAC’s stakeholders have routine powers rather than the extraordinary powers that they were in fact given, as I discuss above. As for the County Executive’s appointees, it’s routine to send them to the Clerk of the Circuit Court, so maybe it was felt that there was no need to specify that process in writing. Basically, however, I am not qualified to answer this question.
In addition to Maryland’s Constitution and the Clerk of the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County (I’d try for Robert Duckworth himself but settle for his assistant, Chris Dillard Wood, who I’ve already queried about this issue), you might try the legislative service library at the Statehouse (in the past, I’ve found Anne Haldeman quite helpful), which should be convenient for you. In the past, I’ve also found librarians at the Court of Appeals Library (also on Rowe Blvd) to be helpful. But I doubt you’ll want to expend such effort to nail down all the lose details in this story.
Bob, like any good PR officer in this type of delicate situation, has been selling you a bill of goods. I don’t know many of the legal particularities—and some of them may simply be ambiguous–but Bob has clearly had no interest in getting to the bottom of this.
Please study the April 13, 2017 Brandenburg email that Bob sent you and has been trying to pass off as the appointment letter for Kipke and Brandenburg (I also love the March 3, 2017 Bill Jones email he included in your package). You could write a long essay on everything wrong with it and, even more remarkably, the pretense, repeatedly and forcefully made, that nothing is wrong with it.
There is a culture at AACPS of not taking inconvenient rules seriously, especially where no powerful special interest group cares enough to enforce them. I’ve had a lot of painful experience with this over the years, and I think Bob’s correspondence gives you a pretty good sense of that culture from the superintendent and school board on down to Bob.
Part of that culture stems from the public itself not taking rules seriously and thinking that substantive issues are far more important. But there is a good reason that the abuse of democratic rules is associated with dictatorship, not democracy. Democracy, as one state constitution (Massachusetts) explicitly states, is based on the rule of laws, not of men. When Bob and his colleagues get to decide which laws they want to follow and which ones they don’t, this signals much deeper problems. It’s a canary in a non-transparent, unaccountable, and deeply corrupt system.
Traditionally, the Capital gives Bob Mosier the last word on any story involving potential controversy with AACPS. I hope you’ll only give him that place if you feel he truly deserves it.
Hey Jim, I’m just getting back to work after a long weekend so please pardon the slow response. My questions are below, and you have my phone number if you’d like to call. My deadline is tomorrow, end of day (if you don’t think you can get me a response in that time period let me know and I will talk to my editors). If you can think of anyone else who can offer an opinion on due process/its importance, let me know!
– What specifically is wrong with the appointment process for SBAC members?
– HB 716 doesn’t establish parameters for SBAC appointments. Do you consider this an oversight, or is it that most bodies adhere to an established due process for appointments, even if one isn’t built into the law?
– What would you consider an appropriate due process for an appointment (I know you said to look to Klasmeier’s appointment as a guide)?
– Why should the public care about this due process? Why isn’t an email good enough?
You also suggested I research basic facts for the appointment process in Maryland. I haven’t been able to find anything in Maryland law so far that specifically lays out an appointment process. Is there a document (or even Robert’s Rules of Order) that you’re referencing, and if so where can I find it?
Thanks for sticking with me on this Jim. I know I’ve been distracted by some shinier stories, but I carved out some time this week to focus on this and I’m glad I did.
Most people prefer to communicate verbally, but that is not true of me. My preferred style of answering questions is in writing. Please let me know your questions and I’ll get back to you promptly with my answers. If my written answers don’t answer your questions, then I think we should talk.
Meanwhile, I’d suggest that you contact the County Executive to get the appointment letters for SBAC Chair Kipke and Amalie Brandenburg. If those appointment letters exist, you’ll probably not be interested in pursuing this story. The stakeholder appointments might be very sloppy but so likely was the enabling legislation that set up the SBAC. I might consider that sloppiness newsworthy, but my hunch is that you would not.
I’d encourage you to think about whether sloppy appointment processes, regardless of their legality, is something the public should be concerned about. Admittedly, like many important democratic process issues, the answer is not self-evident to the average person.
In an ideal world, you could get a legal opinion from the AG’s office concerning the legality of the sloppy appointment processes used by the SBAC stakeholder groups. I don’t doubt you could find a legislator to ask for such an opinion. But it would take a lot of time—after you researched the basic facts of the appointment process, something which you most definitely have not done—and the AG has, in any case, become a highly politicized office. Indeed, working on an elected official’s campaign has become a good way to get appointed to a position in the AG’s office. And pleasing legislators, especially senior ones, is critical to getting appointments to higher office, including to the state’s supreme court (Court of Appeals).
Could we schedule an interview to talk more about the appointment letters via phone Tuesday morning?
After waiting four days and not hearing back from you and then after leaving a message this morning, I filed a Public Information Act request with Bob Mosier for the requested emails shortly before today’s close of business.
What you have received is the type of crap that Bob Mosier sent me. Let’s forget the complete omission of documentation regarding three of the stakeholder appointments and the pseudo documentation regarding the two individuals that were the subject of my Public Information Act request and op-ed. I’d encourage you to carefully look at the Amalie Brandenburg email dated April 13, 2017. If you do, you’ll discover it is not at all what 1) it purports to be, and 2) what you presented it to be in your article. Mosier hints at some problems with it but not the most blatant ones. Ditto for the Bill Jones email dated March 3, 2017.
After the meeting on Nov. 27, Chair Kipke told me that when she moved she threw away her appointment letter from County Executive Schuh, which is why she didn’t provide it to Mosier in response to my Public Information Act request. She claimed that she told this information to Mosier who for whatever reason chose not to share it with me (and, as it turns out, you, too). To check out her story, I’d file a Public Information Act request with the County to get the original copy of the letter from the County Executive’s Office. While you’re at it, you should ask for Brandenburg’s as well. If Kipke couldn’t provide the appointment letter, Mosier should have gotten it from the County Executive. If that letter exists, the appointment process remains embarrassingly sloppy (and worthy of public attention), but Chair Kipke’s appointment would unquestionably be legal.
For what I consider to be a good stakeholder appointment process, I’d suggest you look at the appointment of Jerome Klasmeier. I’d use that as a benchmark to evaluate the others. Some of the stakeholders merely appointed themselves. As for the CRASC appointee, I’m not even sure what due process would be given CRASC’s decision-making processes (as to what exactly those processes were in this case, I don’t know).
When I spoke to you last Friday, you made it clear that you hadn’t read my Public Information Act request and complaint filed with Maryland’s Public Information Act ombudsman. Indeed, you suggested I file a complaint with the Public Information Act Ombudsman—just as I had already done.
As you may recall, I cited that Public Information Act correspondence in my Nov. 27 Capital op-ed and handed you a physical copy of the correspondence, which featured the complaint to the Public Information Act Ombudsman, at the SBAC meeting on the evening of Nov. 27. I also discussed that correspondence and complaint during my public testimony before the SBAC and asked that a copy of the correspondence, which I handed to Mosier while I still had the attention of the SBAC, be included in the SBAC’s public record.
I recognize that the public is usually bored by due process stories. But democracy is built upon due process, so when such stories are shortchanged democracy itself is shortchanged. I wasn’t originally interested in the appointment process issue. I merely stumbled upon it when researching AACPS’s culture of deleting or otherwise not providing official emails in response to Public Information Act requests for them.
Rick, thank you for publishing my op-ed and asking Rachael to follow up.
This communication is in response to your amended request under the Public Information Act, Annotated Code of Maryland, General Provisions Article (GP) § 4-101, et seq., seeking information regarding the School Board Appointment Commission of Anne Arundel County (SBAC).
a copy of the correspondence between you and Susannah Kipke regarding her appointment letter from County Executive Steve Schuh, which she has informed me that she doesn’t have and thus couldn’t provide you.
Documents responsive to the first two items in your request are attached to this email.
Emails between myself and the School Board Appointment Commission members regarding candidate Foster Driver.
With regard to the third item in your request, we have covered this material before, and time has not changed the response. In an effort to fulfill your Public Information Act request of August 28, 2017, I inquired of Mrs. Kipke as to the existence of an “appointment letter” (see attachment). In a phone conversation either that evening or the next day, she informed that she did not have a letter. As you state in your most recent inquiry, she has informed you of the same.
Under the Maryland Public Information Act, State Government Article (SG) §§ 10-611, et seq., I request the following documents: 1) A copy of the Public Information Act request by Rachael Pacella,, the Capital’s education reporter, with respect to the Anne Arundel School Board Appointment Commission (SBAC), 2) a copy of the appointment related information that SBAC commissioners provided to you, as cited in Rachael Pacella’s Capital article dated November 27, 2017 (the quote reads: “Schools spokesman Bob Mosier provided emails between the various groups tasked with selecting commission members and himself, in which officials conveyed their appointment for each spot on the commission.”), and 3) a copy of the correspondence between you and Susannah Kipke regarding her appointment letter from County Executive Steve Schuh, which she has informed me that she doesn’t have and thus couldn’t provide you.
If fulfilling this Public Information Act request is expected to take more than 2 hours, then document requests 1), 2), and 3) above should be costed out separately in your response to me. In addition, in the unlikely event that any information cannot be provided to me in an electronic format, it should also be costed out separately. Note that since 2) has already been gathered for the Capital, it should take you no additional time to provide that information to me.
with you, so if there is a form/additional information you need let me know.
Attached as we discussed are emails sent to me in February/March/April regarding appointment of members to the first School Board Appointment Commission. These are the appointments Mr. Snider incorrectly references in his column.
Please note that I have redacted personal information about Commissioners.
My original email seeking names of appointees (see pages 2-3 of document) incorrectly stated that the County Executive had three appointments. In fact, he has just two. That comes into play with regard to the email on Page 17 of this document, where Amalie Brandenburg, the Education Officer for the County Executive, provided me with three names. Upon realizing my mistake, I had a subsequent phone conversation with Ms. Brandenburg in which she informed me that she and Susannah Kipke would be the appointees and that Mr. Falcon’s name should be removed.
The appointment of the CRASC representative, Josie Urrea, was conveyed to me verbally.
I have similar emails from the Central Maryland Chamber of Commerce (appointment of Melanie Graw) and the Anne Arundel NAACP (appointment of Jacqueline Boone Allsup) for the current session if you feel you need to see them.
Mr. Snider’s inquiry sought “official letters” of appointment, as in those provided by the Governor to persons he appoints. There are no such letters, and I informed Mr. Snider of that. He also knew of the existence of the emails that I provided you.
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References: art. 16
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 art. 26
 art. 70
 art. 87
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