Ann Hollands’ bid for reinstatement as the Department of Transportation’s chief of real estate played out in a series of public hearings held by the state’s Personnel Appeals Board over three years.

In the months since an April 2007 settlement returned her to work with back pay, the appeal board has refused to make public the transcripts or any other records of the public hearings it held on her case between March 2004 and February 2007. Appeal Board Chairman Morris Weintraub has even refused to disclose the dates of the hearings.

In September, months after The Journal first requested the documents, Governor Carcieri’s office made public copies of the voluminous transcripts and exhibits it obtained from Andrew B. Prescott, the Nixon Peabody lawyer the DOT paid $124,281 to defend the firing during the extended hearings.

In his Aug. 28 letter refusing the records, Weintraub asserted the transcripts and exhibits submitted by lawyers on both sides of the dispute were exempt from public disclosure under multiple provisions of the state’s Access to Public Records Act, including “investigatory records,” “request(s) for advisory opinions,” “preliminary drafts, notes, impressions” and “all records which are identifiable to an individual … employee.”

State law requires the disclosure of documents submitted at a public meeting; the transcripts that eventually became public contain no indication the appeals board voted at any time during the three-year span of the hearings to hold them in executive session.

But the appeal board’s lawyer Michael R. McElroy argued, in response to a recent inquiry from the Secretary of State’s office about why it wasn’t filing required notices and minutes of its meetings, that the board is a “judicial body” and thus exempt from the state’s open-government laws. Secretary of State A. Ralph Mollis has asked the attorney general for an opinion.

Within the Open Meetings Law is language that says: “This chapter shall not apply to proceedings of the judicial branch of state government or probate court or municipal court proceedings in any city or town.” There is no blanket exemption for zoning boards or any other state or local board that considers itself “quasi-judicial.” And most court hearings — and the filings and exhibits they generate — are public in any event, as are the daily postings of court calendars.

In seeking an exemption for the Personnel Appeal Board from all of these practices, McElroy argued that “judicial branch” is an undefined term, but the branches of government are “defined in the constitution by the powers given to them” and the Personnel Appeal Board “has been legislatively granted powers that are essentially the same as a judicial body.”

“It is for this reason that the board has never in its history posted public notices of its hearings, nor have the board’s deliberations ever been done in public,” he wrote.

A day before his letter went out, however, a reporter was allowed to attend an open Personnel Appeals Board hearing on a bid by former assistant medical director Sharon Marable in the Department of Health for reinstatement to her job. Governor Carcieri’s spokesman Jeff Neal declined comment on the board’s arguments. He said the law may allow a public body “for a variety of public policy reasons to withhold information, especially if it relates to personnel,” but in cases such as this where it allows release, “it is the governor’s policy to make the information public as often as possible.”