Journal staff report
The Linn County Journal went from being an official Linn County newspaper to not being one on Monday, Aug. 19. Linn County Commission Chair Danny McCullough and Commissioner Jim Johnson voted to strip the Journal of its official status in a 2-to-1 vote, with Commissioner Jason Hightower voting against the matter.
Johnson said the measure was meant to save money, noting that the county had paid the Journal $2,900 in publishing fees since the beginning of the year.
Shortly after the commission’s decision on Monday, Roger Sims, publisher of the Journal, said it was obvious that stripping the legal publication status was meant in retaliation for the Journal’s coverage of the county commission.
He said the commission’s action meant the advertising of legal announcements by the county would cease. He acknowledged that the loss of legal advertising would be felt, but that was only a portion of the income stream for the Journal.
He also said that it would not affect coverage, and that the Journal would continue to provide the same in-depth stories on the county for which it has been recognized.
“We knew when we made the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) request that commissioners would likely take action in retribution for following up on hints that there was some interaction outside of official meetings,” Sims said. “It was a calculated risk, but we were fairly certain that issues were being discussed outside of official meetings. We also decided that it was important to protect the right of Linn County citizens to know what policy decisions were made, and the only way to do that was for those discussions to happen in official open meetings.”
The Journal requested for phone and email records of all three commissioners under the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA). On Saturday, Aug. 10, the Journal published a story about the KORA results that said the records appeared to point to Johnson and McCullough contacting each other outside of commission meetings.
If that was the case, it would likely be a violation of the Kansas Open Meetings Act (KOMA). Under KOMA, members of elected and some appointed boards cannot meet outside of an official meeting unless there is less than a majority of a quorum. In the case of the three Linn County Commissioners, that means that two of them cannot discuss business outside of an official meeting.
The Journal’s KORA request, which was filed on May 29, sought cell phone records of both personal and private phones as well as text or email correspondence between commissioners and a select group of individuals with Citizens for Linn County, an anti-solar group. The KORA request was reviewed by then-county counselor Mark Hagen and was approved.
Last week commissioners voted 2-to-1 to remove Journal editor Charlene Sims from the county planning and zoning commission, a board she has been a member of for more than two decades. That vote came a couple of days after the KORA story broke. McCullough made the motion to remove Sims from the planning commission and cited the KORA request as one of the reasons.
McCullough has not complied with the KORA request to turn over his phones to the sheriff’s office and has said he doesn’t intend to hand over his personal phone. The Journal has filed a complaint with the state attorney generals office seeking to force McCullough to turn the phones into the Linn County Sheriff’s Office to have data read.
Comments