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When town hall is empty Boards debate merits of in-person, remote meetings BY HOLLY KAYS STAFF WRITER fter a mass migration from boardrooms to cyberspace last spring, one by one Western North Carolina’s public bodies have transitioned back to in-person meetings — with the exception of Sylva’s town board. But for a frigid outdoor meeting April 1 to handle a pair of zoning issues, the Town of Sylva has met exclusively via Zoom since the pandemic began. There are a few reasons for that, board members said. Commissioner Ben Guiney, who is an emergency room doctor at Harris Regional Hospital, said that for a long time he’d been pushing to remain virtual as case numbers stayed too high for his liking. “We were going to go back to in-person meetings for this previous meeting,” added Commissioner Mary Gelbaugh, “but we had two of the board members who would have been unable to attend had we gone to an inperson meeting.” Keeping the meeting virtual meant those board members could attend regardless of their summertime comings and goings. The board was planning to hold its first indoor, in-person meeting since March 2020 for
August 4-10, 2021
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Sylva commissioners log in for a remote meeting July 22. Town of Sylva image
an Aug. 12 Board of Adjustments meeting. But on Aug. 2, the town announced that “due to the rising COVID-19 cases in Jackson County,” this meeting, too, would occur via Zoom. “Clearly right now it’s a bad idea to start going back in person, with cases going crazy,” said Guiney. In the seven-day period ending Aug. 2, Jackson County recorded 88 new cases, and Guiney said he’s seeing a steady stream of COVID patients in the emergency room, nearly all unvaccinated. Guiney himself has had both the illness and the vaccine but said he doesn’t want to risk getting it again and is nervous about what might happen if the public is allowed in the boardroom. “One of the things that I have not wanted to contend with is this mask fighting, where someone is refusing to wear a mask and they should be,” he said. “I don’t want to get into that. I don’t want to get into that fight.”
CHANGING THE CONVERSATION Until the pandemic hit, elected bodies didn’t have clear legal authority to meet remotely. In fact, in the months prior to the pandemic Jackson County was engaged in a lively debate over what to do if a commissioner simply stops attending meetings. For most of 2019, then-Commissioner Mickey Luker was absent from the boardroom, though he often called in via speakerphone. His absence had constituents in Cashiers calling for his removal from office. “Regardless of whether you phone in or not, it’s important that the representative that was voted in attends the meetings, the work sessions, beyond just a phone call to engage people with pros and cons and how you feel about whatever issue is being debated,” Mark Letson, a Republican who narrowly lost a 2020 election bid to replace Luker,
said in an October 2019 interview. “You want that one-on-one contact. That’s what he signed up for. That’s what he should fulfill.” But the pandemic turned such conventional wisdom on its head. In May 2020, new legislation explicitly allowed public bodies to meet electronically as long as North Carolina is under a State of Emergency. When the pandemic first hit, many public bodies outright cancelled their meetings, but then most of them turned to Zoom or YouTube to resume public business. However, not all public bodies cut out the in-person component completely, as Sylva did. From the beginning, Jackson County used a hybrid format, with commissioners masked and socially distanced inside the boardroom and a limited number of seats available for members of the public. Down the hall, an overflow room allowed additional space for people to
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OIL DEMONSTRATION by Sarah Sneeden
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