A deeply divided Isle of Palms City Council has decided to move forward with scheduling a disciplinary hearing for a Council member who has been accused of violating the city’s Code of Conduct by releasing information to the public that she obtained during one of the governing body’s many executive sessions.
At its regularly scheduled meeting on Oct. 25, the Council voted 5-4 to ignore the recommendations of its Personnel Committee and move forward with plans to hold a hearing for Council Member Katie Miars. Voting to rescind Resolution 2202-08, which passed 8-1 at a Sept. 13 meeting, were Personnel Committee members John Bogosian, Jan Anderson and Scott Pierce, along with Miars, while Blair Hahn, Kevin Popson, Rusty Streetman, Jimmy Ward and Mayor Philip Pounds supported efforts to continue the hearing process.
The issue of Miars’ alleged violations of the Code of Conduct arose after she wrote an op-ed piece that was published in the Sept. 9 issue of The Island Eye News. According to a statement Pounds read at the Sept. 13 Council meeting, Miars directly quoted “portions of private attorney-client communications that the city attorney provided to the City Council in a memorandum dated June 9, 2022. The article also disclosed communications between Ms. Miars and the city attorney that occurred in executive session.”
“I do not think that a public hearing would be best for the city,” Miars stated at the Oct. 25 meeting. “Council Member Streetman mentioned the fact that I did vote on the public hearing and that is because I had already been determined to be guilty by members of this Council, both in social media and in other ways. Since then, The Post and Courier and Moultrie News have also determined my guilt.” “There’s blame that goes around here,” she added.
“I’m the one who had the courage to write an article in order to get what I believed out in the open that was in the public’s best interest, which was my oath. There have been plenty of things that people have told to their friends that have gotten out in the public that were discussed in executive session. So please don’t make it seem that I am the only person that has ever gone down that road. If we want to start talking about missteps and things that individual Council members have done wrong, that’s fine,” she went on to say. “But we’re going to talk about all of them – not just me.”
At least two Council members apparently felt threatened by Miars’ statement. “It seems to me we have some threatening language going on here,” Streetman said. “In regard to an article that got published, that sort of precipitated the whole thing. It clearly was information that came out of executive session. I just don’t see how we can allow that to happen. We still have an issue here that for the credibility of this Council we need to deal with and not just say ‘OK. It just goes away.”’ “The Council is being threatened. How do we walk away when we have threatening language that if we do this, bad things will happen. You can’t do that,” Hahn commented. “You have to have a third party come in, and they have to make a recommendation to the Council. There’s no way around it.” Miars denied that she had threatened her fellow Council members, pointing out that “If we are going to look at potential violations of our Code of Conduct, we have to look at all members’ potential violations of the Code of Conduct.”
Anderson said the Council made a mistake passing Resolution 2202-08 in September. “We need to rescind that mistake and go back to the beginning,” Anderson noted.
“I know I acted in the heat of the moment, not fully understanding what I was voting for.”
Bogosian was the only Council member to vote against the resolution when it passed on Sept. 13.
Pointing out that the Council established the Code of Conduct without a process to deal with potential violations, Pierce urged his fellow Council members to drop plans for a hearing for Miars.
“We can’t un-ring this bell. For us to pursue this would set fissures within our group here that probably are going to be irreparable. I don’t see any good that can come of it. We would be an absolute spectacle in the community – not just our own community but the surrounding communities. I think we could all take a little dose of humility here and figure out a way we can move forward without creating a spectacle. We’ve got bigger things to do,” Pierce said. “The news lives for days like this,” Pierce concluded.
“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” Bogosian added. “It will only cause more questions and more conflict for this Council.”
“I for one believe we should not go forward with this resolution,” Bogosian, who serves as chair of the Personnel Committee, said at the Committee’s Oct. 18 meeting. “Based on the holes in the process, this would not be good for anybody. It’s a lose, lose, lose proposition.” Ward apparently was unconvinced by the arguments presented by members of the Personnel Committee. “So we go into executive session and you’re going to be comfortable in the future that everything that we need to hear from our attorneys or whatever that we can openly discuss and feel comfortable that it will not be divulged?” Ward asked.
At their Oct. 18 meeting, Personnel Committee members directed city staff to come up with revisions to the city’s Code of Conduct, possibly for consideration by the full Council at its November meeting.
