Following a 45-minute executive session at the beginning of the March 18 meeting, Saratoga resident Tasha Worthington asked the council if they have considered placing executive session after public comment.
“Because 99-percent of the time, from what I have observed, when you guys come out of executive session, there is nothing to talk about from what you were in there for. It is just sealed and we move on after an hour of sitting out here and waiting … I just think that the voters and the public would really appreciate that.”
The mayor or the council did not respond to Worthington’s questions at the meeting. Zeiger explained in a later interview that the council will most likely not move executive session to the end of the meetings.
“The main reason we keep it at the beginning is that if there is anything to discuss from executive session, we can put it on the agenda.”
Worthington also asked if the position on the Airport Board position had been advertised. Lance Grubb, who had just completed his first five-year term on the Airport Board, had been reappointed to the position by Zeiger.
“I guess we have always, if there is someone on a board that shows interest again, it has always been that we put them back on the board,” Zeiger said.
Zeiger added in a followup interview that “new-blood” is important to boards, but there also needs to be a degree of continuity.
Zeiger also said that though people have suggested that he has elected his personal “friends” to boards, many of the people he has assigned to boards recently have been nothing more than acquaintances.
Saratoga citizen Glee Johnson asked if the audit would be discussed any more by the council. “We had the disclosure about the audit and I got a copy of it and we had the auditor come and make comments on it, but the council member had never made much of a comment,” Johnson said.
The town of Saratoga’s audit for the 2013 fiscal year revealed several deficiencies. At the Feb. 18 town council meeting, Zeiger invited Dennis Tschalker ,of Mader Tschalker Peterson & Co., LLC, to present his findings and ask if there had been any “misappropriation of funds.”
At the March 18 meeting, Zeiger explained to Johnson that the audit had already been discussed by the council.
“After the auditor came in and explained … I had asked if there were any more discussion,” Zeiger said.
When asked, in a later interview, where the accusations of misappropriations of funds originally came from, Zeiger said that there were not any direct accusations towards he or Town Clerk Suzie Cox.
Zeiger said that his responses arrive from “just comments being made.”
“When you have people making little comments about hidden charges and misappropriation of funds and things like that, I take that as an accusation,” Zeiger said.
The next town council meeting will take place 6 p.m. on April 1 at Saratoga Town Hall.
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