Court Opinion

ID: 9670387
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:19:46.386481+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:04.197055
License: Public Domain

Vande Walle, Justice,
concurring specialty-
I concur in the majority opinion. I write separately to emphasize that if the series of meetings among some of the members of the school board had taken place prior to the decision not to renew Retzlaff’s contract, for the purpose of evading the constitutional and statutory open-meeting requirements, I would reverse regardless of whether or not a quorum of the board was present at those meetings. Because no action was taken subsequent to the meetings at issue, the remedy applied in Peters v. Bowman Pub. Sch. Dist. No. 1, 231 N.W.2d 817 (N.D.1975), is not applicable. Furthermore, at the time Peters was written in 1975 there was no remedy for a violation of the open-meeting statute. The provision making a violation of the statute an infraction was not enacted until 1977. See Section 44-04-19, N.D.C.C., as amended by 1977 N.D. Laws Ch. 417. As a matter of policy we should not signal approval of any attempts to evade the open-meeting requirements established in the Constitution and statutes of the State of North Dakota.
Insofar as the issue of fact is concerned, the return to the motion for summary judgment and the affidavits in support of the return deal with whether or not the “goal setting” was an evaluation as a matter of law. I concur in the majority’s conclusion that at the trial court level no issue of fact as to substantial compliance was raised. Stensrud v. Mayville State College, 368 N.W.2d 519 (N.D.1985).