Southport officials break open meeting law

SOUTHPORT, N.C. (WWAY) —  City leaders in Southport violated open meeting laws, as they scrambled to discuss the arrest of their police chief Thursday.

“I knew that we needed some protection in our town and I knew that the Sheriff was there,” Dove said.

While Southport city leaders made sure there was still law enforcement after putting their entire police force on leave – they appear to have broken the law themselves. Their meeting Thursday to discuss the situation violated state open meeting law because they failed to notify the media. Things unfolded in a matter of hours and officials said they wanted to tread lightly.

“They kind of didn’t want any information leaked anyway, so you can see our problem there,” Dove said.

Southport Mayor Jerry Dove says officials did not purposely leave the media or the public in the dark, but they tried to handle the case carefully.

Southport City Manager Bruce Oakley was working side by side with Dove the whole time. He explained Friday why they did not send out an alert.

“We were supposed notify the media immediately after we set the meeting. Unfortunately, due to what was going on here, we could not use our computers to make any notifications,” Oakley said.

Dove says they acted as professionally as they could, and they did not want to hide anything from people.

“You can see the problem there, that if we have an emergency, what if this happened at midnight, at 12 o’clock. If we had to have an emergency meeting then, sometimes we can’t get a hold of the newspaper to notify them. But believe me, we’re not trying to run from you. We’re not trying to keep anything from you, and we didn’t,” Dove said.

Oakley and Dove say the community was their first priority in every decision they made, but in extreme cases like these Oakley says they have to make an executive decision.

The City of Southport has notified us of their next meeting on Wednesday.