A Superior Court judge has ruled a tape recording at the center of a lawsuit over the Bertie County Board of Commissioners giving a 42 percent pay hike to then-county manager Zee Lamb was a public record, but curiously ordered the item sealed from public view.

“It’s a little bit perplexing,” Robert E. Hornik Jr., an attorney with the Brough Law Firm in Chapel Hill who represents Friends of Bertie, said of the judge’s ruling. Friends of Bertie, a citizen watchdog group, has 30 days to appeal. Hornik said there are appealable issues.

“We’re very happy with the first part of it that it’s a public record, but disappointed that the judge didn’t go the next step and say ‘OK, some of this public record should be released to the public.’”

After about two hours of arguments Jan. 23 between opposing attorneys in the motion for a summary judgment, Superior Court Judge Richard L. Doughton listened privately in chambers to the recording of a closed session of the county commissioners at which Lamb’s pay raise was discussed.

“He came out and said, ‘The tape is a public record, but I’m not going to have any of it released because I think it contains personnel privacy information,’” Hornik said. “We had hoped he would say ‘I will listen to it and either order all of it to be released or have … a transcript redacted and released.’”

Hornik argued that the tape was not part of a personnel file and that the commissioners had issued a public 32-page defense of the pay hike with Lamb’s consent, so arguing personnel privacy seemed a moot issue.

“We’re well past any point where opening them (the taped discussion) would frustrate any purpose” of the need for privacy, Hornik said. “The contract’s been signed, executed and performed, the manager is no longer there.” Lamb now works in a similar position in Chowan County.

John Davis, one of the founders of the Friends of Bertie, said the case brings attention to the grass-roots organization’s longstanding battle over what it sees as a lack of transparency and abuse of the public trust in Bertie County government.

Davis said his group is alarmed that the commissioners did not include Lamb’s pay raise from $101,725 to $144,000 and travel allotment increase from $6,000 to $9,000 annually in minutes of the Aug. 17, 2009, public meeting at which they were approved. Minutes of the closed meeting during which the beefed-up compensation was discussed have not been released.

The action was not discovered until 18 months later. Davis characterized that as the last straw to an ongoing problem of obtaining minutes of closed sessions.

“There’s some minutes that didn’t get released for 80 months” after the county commission met in closed session, Davis said in explaining the decision to file suit. Friends of Bertie alleges the county has not released any minutes of closed sessions since January 2008. In July 2011 there were 57 sets of closed session minutes not released for public inspection.

Friends of Bertie earlier collected “thousands of signatures” on a petition condemning Lamb’s huge pay hike at a time of national and local recession, Davis said. The petition also demanded that the county commissioners rescind the raise and asked the General Assembly to order a recall election of the county commissioners if they didn’t. The raise remained in effect, and no recall was ordered.

Prior to the courtroom showdown, Hornik had hoped the judge might define what is a reasonable amount of time by which a public agency must release closed session minutes, and offer insight into where the courts should draw the line between open government and personnel privacy.

Dan Way is a contributor to Carolina Journal.