Manitou tape released

MANITOU SPRINGS - A local man wanted the chance to tell city leaders how he felt about the way they’d treated him.

Privately.

So the Manitou Springs City Council arranged in March for a closed-door meeting they now acknowledge was illegal.

The closed session violated the state’s open meetings law, said city officials, who released a tape of the March 20 meeting this week at The Gazette’s request.

“We have with us Patrick Foos . . . to address us without the media or anybody else, about his feelings,” Mayor Mark Morland says at the beginning of the tape.

Colorado law requires that public governments meet and conduct business in public. They can meet behind closed doors for several reasons, including personnel matters, land acquisitions and some legal questions.

Morland said Friday they wanted to accommodate Foos and their attorney, Alan Jensen, told them they could have the closed session.

“We didn’t have a sense that this was an illegal meeting, otherwise we wouldn’t have had it,” Morland said. “Certainly a government works on transparency and trust.”

He said the city’s willingness to release the tape shows its desire to learn from its mistakes. “It’s a good lesson for me,” he said. “I don’t want the citizens of Manitou to think we weren’t trying to work for their best interest. I agree completely that we need to honor the executive session in spirit as well as the law.”

Councilman Shannon Solomon, who has criticized the city’s involvement in the Foos matter, said he didn’t think the council intentionally held the meeting illegally.

“But I don’t think anybody asked, either. Ignorance is not a defense,” he said.

In March, city officials revealed an odd situation they’d been dealing with for several years.

In 2001, John Smischny, a long-time resident who was dying of cancer, chose Foos, a family friend, to handle his affairs and administer his estate.

One week later, Smischny apparently changed his mind. Meeting with Marcy Morrison — who was about to become mayor — and her attorney husband, Howard, Smischny said he wanted his property sold and the money divided among the city, school and parking districts.

Before Smischny could sign anything, he died.

For several years, city officials left the matter alone but last summer decided it was time to seek the money. The council held a series of closed meetings to decide how to proceed, labeling them as conferences to receive legal advice.

By March, city officials and Foos had reached an agreement that the city would be the beneficiary.

But Foos, unhappy with the city’s approach, asked for a private audience before the deal was finalized. The council scheduled the closed session, labeling it as “acquisition of property.”

That’s one of the exemptions allowed under the Colorado Open Meetings Law — it helps avoid disclosure of information that would give an unfair competitive or bargaining advantage to others.

It doesn’t allow a council to meet privately with a property owner to talk about acquisition of property, said Steve Zansberg, attorney for The Gazette and the Colorado Press Association.

But property acquisition wasn’t the topic of discussion. The 23-minute session was an emotional critique of the council’s approach.

“The sneaking-around part made me most mad,” Foos told them during the closed meeting in March.

One of the criticisms he leveled was that the council had kept the matter from him by discussing it in closed sessions over eight months. “Executive sessions have their place. But what this was used for was pure crap,” Foos is heard to say on the tape.

Morland said they wanted to accommodate Foos because they sympathized with his desire for privacy in the situation in which he found himself.

Yet, Morland said, in retrospect it was the council’s job to refuse a private meeting. “The mistakes we made are ones that I have to take responsibility for,” he said.