County commissioners to appoint Cd'A trustee

COEUR d’ALENE — The vacant school board seat in Coeur d’Alene will be filled by someone appointed by Kootenai County commissioners.

Based on a legal opinion provided by outside counsel at the request of the board, the four remaining trustees on the five-member board voted unanimously Tuesday to rescind their Feb. 27 decision to declare a vacancy in the Zone 1 seat.

The seat in question was filled by elected trustee Edie (Brooks) McLachlan until her resignation on June 6. She announced on May 19 that she would be resigning, and the trustees declared a vacancy on that day. On June 6, they appointed Wanda Quinn to replace McLachlan.

Quinn was subsequently sworn in and acted as board chair until Feb. 8, when a district judge ruled her appointment to be “null and void.”

“Randy Adams has rendered his opinion that the vacancy was null and void at the time of the resignation in June of 2011. Therefore, the 120 days has gone past. It is now up to the county commissioners to fill the vacancy,” said school board chair, Sid Fredrickson, on Tuesday.

Idaho Code 33-504 requires that a school board must declare a vacancy within 30 days when any trustee resigns.

The law further requires that school board members must appoint a new trustee from within the trustee zone within 90 days. After 120 days, if the vacancy still exists, the law states the appointment shall be made by the county commissioners.

Coeur d’Alene attorney Randall Adams wrote that in his opinion the vacancy declared last spring when McLachlan announced her pending resignation was still in place, so the 120 days has expired.

At their Feb. 27 meeting, in addition to declaring the vacancy that is now rescinded, Coeur d’Alene school board members voted to hire outside counsel, rather than school district attorney, Charles Dodson, to review and advise them on the process of selecting another appointee.

Dodson was removed from handling school board business that falls under the Idaho law regarding trustee vacancies, but he will continue to advise the board on all other matters.

Dodson represented the board in the court case that led to the judge’s decision to invalidate Quinn’s appointment. Following the decision, Dodson told The Press that in his opinion, the 30-day clock for the process of declaring a vacancy started ticking Feb. 8, when the judge issued his decision.

The court case was initiated last summer by a complaint filed against the board by school trustees Tom Hamilton and Terri Seymour who were elected in May.

They objected to the process used to appoint Quinn to replace McLachlan. The appointment took place while Hamilton and Seymour were trustees-elect, with no voting power.

Several days prior to Quinn’s appointment, Hamilton and Seymour sent a letter to the school board asking that the members not rush the appointment process.

McLachlan, board chair at the time, told The Press the board would not wait to make the appointment and that she would help select the appointee, which she did.

Now, it is in the hands of the county commissioners to make the final decision, but the school board and district may be doing the footwork.

“The statute does not specify how the board of county commissioners must perform its mandated task of appointing a replacement trustee,” Adams wrote in his legal opinion given to the board.

Adams stated there is nothing that prohibits the commissioners from “delegating the task of taking applications, interviewing candidates, and creating a short list or even recommending a single candidate, so long as the commissioners then make the appointment.”

Superintendent Hazel Bauman said it is likely the commissioners will be discussing the matter during a meeting in the near future.