The Wisconsin Transparency Project has filed a lawsuit in Oconto County Circuit Court alleging that the Abrams Town Board and Abrams Planning Commission held multiple illegal meetings from July through September.
Because the process of approving the rezoning of prime agricultural land into a residential subdivision was so flawed, Tom Kamenick, president and founder of WTP, is asking Judge Jay Conley for a temporary injunction halting any further progress on the development pending resolution of the case. A hearing is scheduled for Nov. 17, three days before the Oconto County Board of Supervisors’ next meeting.
Developer Mike Hubbard of VanHunk Enterprises has proposed developing a 40-acre parcel on the northwest corner of County Road D and Cross Road into a residential subdivision of 16 homes.
Initial planning commission approval had to be redone because neighboring property owners did not receive notice in time to attend a July meeting, according to Kamenick. The commission’s August meeting was not noticed in any manner, he claimed, and when attendees brought that failure to town officials’ attention, they were ignored.
The lawsuit alleges that not only was the August Planning Commission improperly noticed, none of the planning commission meetings about the redevelopment were properly noticed. The town did not put notices of those meetings on its website and posted them in only one or two locations. State law requires notices to be posted in either three physical locations or one physical location, or paid to be published in a local newspaper, which the town does not do, and on the website. The town also issued four different notices for its September Board meeting, meaning none were legally effective.
Furthermore, town board members have been holding discussions of redevelopment outside of public meetings, Kamenick claimed in his suit. Because any two members of a three-person board form a quorum, any time two members gather and discuss town business outside of a properly noticed, public meeting, that’s a secret, illegal meeting, he said.
“This process has been flawed from the start,” Kamenick said. “The town board has been trying to ram this through against residents’ wishes in illegal meetings. We want the court to hit the brakes and send this back to the drawing board.”
