The county's Environmental Review Board, an advisory board to the commissioners, held a closed-session meeting in July that might have been illegal.

According to minutes from that meeting, the review board met with Chatham County's attorney to discuss whether the county's subdivision ordinance allowed it to require environmental reviews from developers.

The Chatham County Board of Commissioners chairman and vice chairman, however, say they don't want their advisory boards to hold closed-session meetings.

"I think as a policy, no advisory boards need to go into closed session," said Commissioners Chairman Carl Thompson, who learned of the meeting after it occurred.

"I think it would be highly unusual for an advisory board to go into closed session," said Vice Chairman George Lucier, who also said he did not know about the meeting until afterward. "There would be very few reasons. I think closed sessions serve a purpose, but in most cases things should be done out in the open."

The commissioners created the volunteer review board to help them keep watch on the environment, particularly watersheds.

The 10-member board was asked to establish triggers, or standards, that would require developers to submit an environmental impact statement before projects could be approved.

On July 24, Chatham County Attorney Kevin Whiteheart sent a six-page memo to the review board and the commissioners, saying the county's current rules were too vague. That meant the review board could not require impact statements from developers. Developers can voluntarily submit statements.

Two days later, at the review board's regular monthly meeting, he advised the board to go into closed session for a "legal clarification," according to the board's minutes from the open meeting, which are on the county's Web site.

According to the closed-session minutes, Whiteheart discussed the reasoning behind his memo.

"[Whiteheart] feels the [subdivision] statute is probably void for vagueness," the minutes say. "It is difficult for someone that has been asked to do an [environmental assessment] to know what they are supposed to do. ... For [the environmental review board], the challenge is determining what the acceptable format that we want is. Void for vagueness is where you are getting ready to comply with the law and you can't figure out what it is you need to do, you need to guess at it."

Any public body, including advisory boards, can call for a closed session to consult with its attorney. But before it can go into closed session, state law requires the public body to cite the section of the state's open meetings law that allows the information to be discussed confidentially.

State law prohibits closed-door sessions to discuss general policy or "merely because an attorney employed or retained by the public body is a participant."

Board members unsure

Even some review board members later complained about the closed meeting. "It was not clear to me why we went into closed session," said Chairwoman Allison Weakley, who said board members agreed to it because Whiteheart advised them to.

Mike Tadych, a media law expert and lawyer with Raleigh-based Everett, Gaskins, Hancock & Stevens, reviewed the review board's closed-session minutes. The firm also represents The News & Observer.

"It may have been appropriate to discuss the memo [in closed session], but they got into a policy discussion," he said. "At some point, they probably should have ended the closed session when they started to discuss policy. I would admit, though, it's hard to know when they should have ended it because the minutes aren't clear."

He added the board should have taken verbatim minutes, although it was not bound by law to do so.

Whiteheart recently wrote a policy proposal that the commissioners requested on closed-session meetings. Several legal experts, however, said parts of his first draft seem illegal. Chatham Citizens for Effective Communities, a planned-growth group in the county, wrote the commissioners a four-page memo with nearly a dozen concerns about the policy, particularly its application to county advisory boards.

"While these entities are covered both by the open meetings and public records laws, it is far from clear that many or any of them would be legally entitled to hold closed sessions," wrote CCEC member John Graybeal, who is also a lawyer.

The commissioners have since asked Whiteheart to work with Graybeal to write another draft of the policy.