The attorney general won't investigate. Neither will the prosecuting attorney. So, Washington County will try to investigate itself.
That's right. The county will investigate its own road department to try to get to the bottom of bridge safety questions sparked by a video that is part of a federal lawsuit against the county.
First, here's the background:
George Braswell, a road department employee, brought the lawsuit against the county, claiming his superiors harassed him for discussing his concerns about bridge construction and retaliated against him for supporting then-Assessor Jeff Williams in a 2014 race against County Judge Marilyn Edwards.
The video shows Williams pulling rebar out of a bridge pier by hand. The steel was supposed to be permanently bonded to the concrete, which was part of the Stonewall Bridge west of Prairie Grove. That unfinished bridge has since been ordered demolished and redone. The county also reduced load limits to three tons on another bridge, the Harvey Dowell Bridge southeast of Fayetteville. Braswell raised similar construction questions about that bridge.
The litigation is headed to a settlement conference later this month and may disappear, but the questions about bridge safety naturally continue.
The video may have been used in Williams' campaign but it didn't really get widely shown until last month, when it surfaced in the lawsuit.
To their credit, county officials shared it publicly and discussed publicly the need for an investigation of bridge safety. They just haven't been able to find anyone to take the task on.
Different ones turned to Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and Prosecutor Matt Durrett. But both have now said it's not their responsibility.
That led to the county's concoction of the plan to have Dan Short and Eva Madison head an internal investigation.
Short is Judge Edwards' chief of staff and the man to whom the road department directly reports within the administration. Madison is a member of the Quorum Court and the one who first asked the attorney general to investigate this bridge situation.
While the plan won't be finalized until a Monday meeting, Edwards and the Washington County Quorum Court agreed on Thursday to go the way of an internal investigation.
The curious part of this approach is the involvement of one Quorum Court member.
Presumably, the county judge, who is responsible for county roads, could have already had her chief of staff conduct an internal investigation to determine who might have been responsible for decisions impacting the safe construction of bridges.
She didn't, Short said last week, because neither she nor he thought that the public wouldn't accept such an investigation as credible.
Edwards wanted someone else to come in and do an investigation "and take it anywhere it went," he said.
That's not happening, so the judge and the court signed on to a two-person team to investigate internally.
Adding a court member does allow that one individual to ask more questions, but it will apparently be done completely out of the public eye.
That fact does little to enhance credibility of the investigation.
In fact, the point of having just one court member involved is to work around the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, which is intended to let the public monitor its government.
Were two or more of the court members involved in such a meeting, they would violate the state's open meetings law if that meeting wasn't open to the public.
County Attorney Steve Zega told the court members Thursday that using one of them for the investigation would allow in-depth interviews with county employees without the press present.
He's right that this bridge controversy is serious enough that a public interview process might draw press coverage and perhaps other attention as well.
The Arkansas FOI Act provides access not just to the press but to all citizens to the meetings of its governmental bodies, even gatherings of two or more to discuss public business.
A publicly held inquiry could be difficult and uncomfortable for the road department employees interviewed. Consequently, the plan now is to limit involvement in the investigation to the judge's chief of staff and one court member to keep other ears from hearing.
The plan puts an especially challenging burden on Madison. She must work independently of her Quorum Court colleagues, including her own mother, who is also on the court.
She cannot go to one or more of them to talk about what she's hearing from county employees without violating the FOI Act. Her reports to her court colleagues must be made in public, presumably at the conclusion of the internal investigation.
Meanwhile, there are other ongoing attempts to secure some outside oversight from state auditors and from the state Department of Highways and Transportation.
That may or may not happen. The county may just have to settle for what it can find out on its own.
And the public will have to settle for what the county says it finds out on its own.
Commentary on 04/18/2015