Lumberton Twp. acts to correct keeping of minutes

A Burlington County community that is being sued by two government watchdog groups over losing years of official meeting minutes - for a second time - disciplined its township clerk this week and began taking steps to reconstruct the missing records.

Lumberton Township Clerk Stephanie Yurko was suspended for 60 days without pay, Township Administrator Brandon Umba said in a news release issued late Wednesday after the five-member Township Committee met to discuss the issue.

John Paff, chairman of the New Jersey Libertarian Party's Open Government Advocacy Project, and John Schmidt, with the New Jersey Foundation for Open Government, recently filed lawsuits in Superior Court saying the public was being denied access to meeting minutes that it is entitled to review under state law. A hearing was set for next Friday.

"The minutes are part of the tools we have to hold public officials accountable," Paff said. "The public is in charge, and we have every right to monitor the workings of our public servants."

Umba said the committee voted, 4-0, to suspend the clerk due to "missing executive session minutes from the years 2011, 2012, and 2013." The minutes provide details of official business conducted during private sessions, when litigation, personnel, contract negotiations, and other confidential matters are discussed. State laws require that these minutes be kept and made available to the public when the confidential issues are resolved.

In 2009, Paff sued the township when the clerk reported that all executive session minutes kept prior to 2003, before she was named the clerk, were missing. Paff did not seek monetary damages but wanted assurances that the records would be safely maintained in the future, in the interest of transparency and public accountability.

Township officials, including Yurko, then signed a consent agreement that said the clerk would maintain written minutes of all meetings in a binder and make them available for public review.

Yurko was unavailable for comment.

Paff said it was disappointing to learn the minutes were missing again, and he sued to enforce the consent order. But he also said the clerk should not take all the blame.

"The Township Committee is ultimately responsible for making sure the minutes are there. . . . This shows government dysfunction," he said.

Mayor Lew Jackson said in a statement that the committee was working on "bringing our record-keeping into the 21st century by use of scanning and electronic storage with the appropriate backup and safety systems in place." He said this should help "ensure that all documents are appropriately preserved and stored and may also, at least in some cases, have the benefit of making them more accessible via the Internet."

The mayor said that township officials learned after the recent lawsuits were filed that Yurko had kept the executive session minutes on a thumb or zip drive and that the drive had been damaged. The township's computer service provider was unable to retrieve the data, and a specialist who was called in to help also could not restore it, he said.

Since that time, Jackson said, a search of paper copies, electronic copies, and emails turned up all of the 2011 minutes, and part of the 2012 and 2013 minutes.

"The minutes that do exist have now been placed in appropriate binders and are available for public review," he said.

Jackson also said that the legal issues are being negotiated and that he was hopeful they will be "formally resolved" before the court hearing.

Paff said that he would like procedures put in place for "a higher level of accountability" and that he, too, hopes the issue can be resolved in the public's interest.