Say Anything Blog

This time his beef is that two North Dakota Workforce Safety board members had dinner together and didn’t notify the public of the “meeting.”

A former North Dakota Workforce Safety and Insurance executive says he walked in on an illegal meeting of agency board members in a restaurant, and he has asked Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem to investigate.

“They are breaking the sunshine laws. This is why we’re in the problem that we’re in,’’ said Jim Long, who was fired in March from his WSI job as chief of support services.

Long believes he was dismissed for disclosing possible agency wrongdoing to the Burleigh County prosecutor, allegations that WSI officials deny. Two separate examinations of the agency have been critical of its past management practices.

That last sentence would be more accurate if it said that two separate examinations of WSI found criticisms of the agency but no evidence of the sort fraud and corruption Long alleges.

Fargo Forum reporter Janell Cole is filing a separate complaint about another apparent infraction of open meetings laws:

Separately, Forum Communications Co.’s state Capitol reporter, Janell Cole, requested an open meetings legal opinion from Stenehjem about a separate June 10 meeting of an ad hoc subcommittee of WSI’s board, during which the possibility of raising board members’ compensation was discussed.

The meeting was held by telephone conference call, and it appeared from conversations among members Bobbie Ripplinger, J.P. Wiest and Dyste that they had already talked about the issues and each other’s opinions about them, the complaint said.

As far as I’m concerned, if North Dakota’s open meetings law is so broadly written that two board members can’t even hold conversations with one another individually or even socialize together privately without needing to go through the formalities of a public meeting there’s something wrong with the law.

After all, we all want transparency, but let’s not be absurd.

What’s really interesting about all this is while Forum reporter Janell Cole (who once called me WSI’s “chief apologist”) is willing to go to the Attorney General about ticky-tacky, though admittedly relevant, questions about the law she and the rest of her colleagues in the North Dakota media still refuse to report that Jim Long (now a Democrat candidate for the state legislature) was fired for his job not for exposing fraud and malfeasance at WSI (something no investigation into the agency has been able to prove) but rather because he had an affair with one of his subordinates while working at the agency.

Plus he gave that subordinate a massive raise (raising questions of nepotism from other employees) and faced allegations of racial discrimination.

These are facts gleaned from documents obtained from WSI through an open records request which no media outlet in North Dakota - certainly not Janell Cole or the Fargo Forum - has reported despite having published a plethora of articles casting Long as some sort of truth-telling, whistle-blowing martyr.

For all their concern about WSI’s openness and transparency I guess Cole, the Forum and the rest of the state’s journalists are only interested in the public getting one side of this story.