In the quarrel between the Lenoir County Board of Elections and Director Dana King, there’s little middle ground.
King sent her reply to the State Board of Elections executive director Tuesday, and in it pulls no punches in defending herself and her staff in the way they conducted business. She completely refutes the county board on most of its allegations, and points out how others are at least partially incorrect.
In total, the response is 25 pages long, accompanied by 434 pages of documentary exhibits to back up the arguments contained therein. Because of limited bandwidth, The Free Press cannot host the document on its site, but King said she will make her reply publicly available online.
In a statement with the public release of the reply, King thanked everyone who supported her and explained her position as a public servant.
A Kinston native, she said she “chose to stay here, and do my part to help make Kinston/Lenoir County a better place to live. I have always tried to do a very professional job at the Lenoir County Board of Elections, while serving the citizens of Kinston/Lenoir County. It has been my great pleasure to work with so many wonderful people through the years!”
King added she “tried diligently” to work with the current members of the county board.
In the reply, she says she never had any unsatisfactory performance reviews or documented complaints about her tenure since taking over in 1997, except from the current board, which took office in 2011.
Calling the petition “totally without merit,” King says the board members have been unwilling to work together as a team, unwilling to work with the staff and unsupportive of the staff to meet the board’s budgetary needs.
To that extent, King notes the 2012-13 LCBOE budget has $70,000 remaining, and returned $295,000 in appropriations to the county over the last five years. Part of the reason for the cost overrun during the past election, she says, was due to the board’s adding more days for one-stop voting and having the 188 poll workers trained twice.
As well, King says her attempts to communicate with the board weren’t upheld on its end, not the other way around, as the board contends in the petition.
“They held many secret meetings, and must have been working on their Petition for Termination for quite some time,” King says in the reply. “Why not save us all the pain and suffering they have caused, and just come ‘communicate’ with me?”
One of those secret meetings was supposed to have occurred on Oct. 18, 2011. King says LCBOE Secretary Oscar Herring and board member Kim Allison called an unadvertised meeting to ask for the resignation of LCBOE Chairwoman Sharon Kanter because, King says, Kanter missed so many meetings as to make the situation “so unsatisfactory.”
In regard to perceived ad-hoc and irregular scheduling of meetings and other matters, King called the board members “inexperienced” and “ineffective,” displaying a “lack of leadership skills.”
Kanter, delegated by the board members to speak on their behalf, said she’d just received the reply and hadn’t had a chance to discuss it with Allison or Herring.
“Obviously I’d like to comment, but I don’t think I can comment, because the petition and the reply are in the hands of the (executive director) at the State Board of Elections,” Kanter said.
SBE Executive Director Gary Bartlett has 20 days after receiving the reply to render a decision.
Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wes.wolfe@kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter @WolfeReports.