The Lenoir County Board of Elections and its director, Dana King, sat down in a closed meeting with state elections Executive Director Gary Bartlett Thursday.
It spanned more than two hours.
“This was simply — I wouldn’t term it a mediation, but it was a conversation,” Board Chairwoman Sharon Kanter said. “He facilitated a conversation. And, that really is all that happened.”
Kanter also said, “There was no decision taken, no motion made — there was no decision and no action taken in closed session.”
The meeting was in regard to the Board’s petition to terminate King from her position, and her response. King has been the Lenoir County elections director since 1997.
After Bartlett emerged from the Board of Elections offices shortly after 4 p.m., the board discussed a few items related to the budget, and King left the conference room to make copies for the board members. Shortly thereafter, the board went into closed session again, with King joining the discussion once she returned with the copies.
Ultimately, no immediate actions were taken.
Once back in open session, board members passed around and signed each other’s copies of the Board of Elections’ response to King’s reply to its petition. A copy was made for Bartlett, as well.
In the response, the board reiterated its positions in the petition and refuted King’s claims in her reply, though going into more detail on a number of contentious issues.
Mentioned up front is a counter to King’s claims of the board’s inexperience, citing Kanter’s decades of management experience in business and nonprofits, board Secretary Oscar Herring’s administrative experience in the military and board member Kim Allison’s experience with election law, serving on various boards and being the co-owner of a business.
“Characterizing this board as ‘inexperienced’ is laughable,” the response says. “The claim demonstrates Mrs. King’s lack of interest in learning anything about her board members’ backgrounds and being open to bringing their wide experience to benefit the BOE’s operations.”
The board also denies that Allison and Herring asked Kanter to resign as chairwoman at a closed meeting on Oct. 18, 2011, calling the allegation “astonishing.” The response says King had no idea what happened at the meeting, as she was not there, unless she was illegally recording it through unknown means.
The response goes on to say that Allison and Herring, who were more aware of the expectations of the board, educated Kanter of those expectation and asked her if she was up to meeting them. Kanter said she could, and asked the other board members if they wanted her to step down. They said no, and moved on from the meeting.
Frequently, the response mentions King didn’t provide orientation needed to new board members, which it says would have made meetings like the one mentioned unnecessary.
“Mrs. King again absolves herself of any responsibility for even orienting, let alone training, new board members — even new members who have little or no prior experience with the board to which they have been appointed. She clearly considers that to be the exclusive province of the (N.C. State Board of Elections),” the response says.
King said in her reply that the board had “many secret meetings” and believed it had been working on the petition for termination for a while. The board says there have been no secret meetings of the board, and termination only became a current matter after the county manager’s memo to King in December.
“With the outcome of the November 2012 general election driving an inevitable change in the board’s composition in July 2013, the board decided by consensus to simply let the new board, after it was sworn in, determine Mrs. King’s status,” the response says.
It continues, “This board decision changed when we received copies of County Manager Mike Jarman’s Dec. 5, 2012 memo to Mrs. King, numerous copies of which are attached as exhibits to both the Petition to Terminate and to Mrs. King’s Reply. That memo was the first indication to this board that there were the kinds of mismanagement issues at the BOE documented in that memo.”
The resolution of the dispute remains in Bartlett’s hands.
Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wes.wolfe@kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter @WolfeReports.