COD acknowledges Open Meetings Act violation

College of DuPage trustees approved Monday a court order admitting a previous board violated the Open Meetings Act in 2014 when it voted behind closed doors to extend the contract of then-President Robert Breuder.

The board voted 4-3 to accept the proposed agreement that would resolve a lawsuit brought by DuPage County State's Attorney Robert Berlin against trustees. The draft judgment order says the board broke the law with its secret vote on March 6, 2014, and could declare the extension of Breuder's contract null and void.

The agreement is expected to come before a DuPage County judge within a week.

"I think the consent judgment speaks for itself, and the legal impact of it will be determined elsewhere by the courts," said board Chairwoman Deanne Mazzochi, who was not on the panel at the time. "It's simply better at this stage for the college to be able to put this chapter to bed and move forward."

Three trustees - Erin Birt, Dianne McGuire and Joe Wozniak - opposed the agreement. All three sat on the board at the time prosecutors said members cast an illegal closed-door vote two years ago.

Berlin filed a complaint in March accusing the board of violating the act during a 90-minute executive session on March 6, 2014.

A majority of trustees at the time voted by a show of hands to extend Breuder's contract by an additional year to 2019 and to authorize Birt, then the chairwoman, to relay word of that decision to Breuder, according to Berlin's complaint.

Berlin said the "showing of hands was ... a vote resulting in a 'final action' within the meaning of the Open Meetings Act since the board of trustees did not subsequently repeat the vote in an open session."

But McGuire said the board "had no final action to take in an opening meeting." Though she has criticized COD's spending on legal fees, McGuire said Berlin's complaint "should have been vigorously contested by our counsel."

"The polling determined that the board had not formed an intention not to renew (Breuder's contract)," McGuire said of the 2014 meeting.

The agreement between Berlin and the board would continue to call into the question a $762,868 severance package to buy Breuder out early from the remaining time left on his contract.

The board didn't have to vote on extending Breuder's contract. Under the terms of his agreement, the pact was automatically extended for another year every April 1 - unless either Breuder or the board gave written notice of their intent to terminate it.

Those contract extensions, which began in 2010 and were not made public, helped drive up the cost of the $762,868 deal awarded to Breuder in January 2015 and later revoked.

In his complaint, Berlin said he reviewed minutes and verbatim records of four closed meetings - two in February 2014 and two in March of that year.

In the closed meeting March 6, Berlin said, the board "recognized that taking final action to authorize such notice in closed session would be contrary to the Open Meetings Act."

But the board's lawyer, who wasn't named in Berlin's complaint, asked trustees for a show of hands to reflect support for extending the contract.

"The contract calls for authorizing the Chair to extend," the lawyer told trustees. "I don't want a voting in a closed (meeting), so why don't we just raise hands as to who would be willing to authorize the Chair to extend the contract."