Commissioners admit Sunshine Act violation

Berks County Commissioners Chairman Christian Leinbach announced Tuesday that the board unintentionally had broken a state law.

Leinbach said during an operations meeting that an oversight led to a violation of the Pennsylvania Sunshine Act, the law that requires public agencies to advertise and hold public meetings when they deliberate agency business or take a vote.

The violation, which was flagged by the county solicitor, involved the timing of board approval for payroll and payments that were made during the last week of the year. The commissioners did not hold a meeting that week and did not approve the payments in advance at their prior meeting.

Solicitor Christine Sadler said the commissioners typically will approve payments in advance when they know a meeting will not be held the next week. But in rare cases, like this one, that doesn’t happen.

When that situation has arisen in the past, the commissioners would simply ratify and confirm the payments after they were made. A change last year to the Sunshine Act no longer allows that.

The General Assembly unanimously amended the law in 2021 to require agencies to provide meeting agendas at least 24 hours before a public meeting. The agenda must include all issues that will be discussed or acted upon and, with few exceptions, limits the issues public officials can discuss or act upon.

Supporters said the change was intended to promote public attendance and participation at public meetings by letting people know what will be discussed. Prior to the change, there was no law that required agencies to tell people what would be discussed at public meetings.

Leinbach said the change means the board has to approve spending in advance, and acknowledged that by not approving payments for the final week of the year the board was in violation of the law.

“That was a mistake,” he said. “It is clearly in violation of the law. We were not aware of this mistake until after it occurred and the payments had been made.”

Leinbach said that even though the board is not supposed to approve payments after the fact, that was the only option available in this case because the payments had already been made. He said the commissioners want to acknowledge their error and take steps to avoid it in the future.

To address the problem, Leinbach suggested the board adopt a resolution that authorizes payments, electronic transfers and payroll disbursement subject to final approval of the chief administrative officer for all weeks when a commissioners meeting cannot be held for any and all reasons.

The motion passed unanimously.

Leinbach said the change made to the law had good intentions but created some logistical challenges. He explained that it forces decisions to be made out of sequence and in some cases without the finalized figures for payments and payroll.

“It creates problems from a controller standpoint and I understand that,” he said. “I’m not blaming the controller at all — they’ve got to work on guesstimates now instead of what we used to do. This is our way to address that so we’re not sitting here in the future with a violation of the law.”