State slaps Worcester for closed-door planning purge

The state has found that Worcester County's commissioners violated Maryland's open-meetings law when they decided last spring behind closed doors to consolidate county departments - a move that led to the firing of 11 planners and inspectors amid controversy over the county's plans for development along the coastal bays near Ocean City.

The shakeup came as environmentalists expressed alarm over proposed zoning changes in Worcester that would allow more residential and commercial development in some sensitive areas bordering the state's coastal bays. The string of fragile lagoons along Maryland's Atlantic shore are in better shape overall than the Chesapeake Bay, but their health is slipping amid growing pollution, University of Maryland scientists have found.

County commissioners defended the staff reorganization, which eliminated Worcester's planning department, as a budget-trimming move.  But in response to a complaint by the Assateague Coastal Trust, the state's open meetings compliance board declared that the commissioner were not legally entitled to go into executive session on May 26 to talk about it. Their closed-door deliberations also roamed beyond the personnel matters they had cited as their reason for excluding the public, the board found. The county commissioners later voted in an open session on June 2 to affirm the decision they'd made in private earlier.

Kathy Phillips, the coastal trust's executive director, issued a statement saying she wasn't surprised by the state's findings, delivered to her in an Oct. 27 letter. "It is unfortunate that our elected officials felt they did not have to be accountable to the law," Phillips said, "and worse, they did not understand their actions behind closed doors should have been conducted in the light of sunshine."