Two questions have hung over La Plata’s mayoral censure since it passed Aug. 18: whether the council actually had the legal authority to censure Mayor Jeannine James at all, and whether the meeting that produced the censure was itself lawfully conducted. A review of the full meeting recording — not just the resolution or the participants’ public statements — shows both questions were fought over live, on the record, in ways none of the prior coverage of this story has captured.
The fight over the meeting’s legality centered on a closed session the council held partway through. Minutes before the council voted to close part of the meeting, James told her colleagues she had spoken that day with the Office of the Attorney General, which she said conveyed that the Open Meetings Act’s personnel exception doesn’t cover criticism of an elected official by colleagues — because expressing unhappiness about what an official did isn’t a “personnel matter” under the statute.
Town Attorney Todd Pounds disputed how much weight that conversation should carry, telling the council no formal decision had been made and that, of an unspecified number of Compliance Board members, only two had said the closed session might possibly be a problem. The council voted 4-1 to close the meeting anyway, then returned about 15 minutes later and read a standard Open Meetings Act disclosure into the record — the statutory topics, attendees and actions taken — before proceeding to the censure vote itself. That disclosure satisfies the Act’s after-the-fact transparency requirement regardless of whether closing the session was proper in the first place; whether it was proper is a separate legal question that remains genuinely open, since no court or the Compliance Board itself has yet ruled on it.
Notably, one council member also referenced an earlier closed session, held before Aug. 18, where “conduct of an elected official” had already come up — meaning this isn’t the only closed-door discussion of the underlying dispute this term.
The authority question got a sharper airing than previous coverage has shown. When James pressed Pounds, on the record, to identify where the Charter or council rules give the body jurisdiction to discipline one of its own, he cited the council’s “general regulatory powers” rather than a specific provision — as previously reported. What hasn’t been reported is that a council member separately offered a textual citation: Charter Section C3-5, which states “the Council shall be the judge of the election and qualifications of its members.”
That language, verified independently against the Charter’s full text, is a narrow, standard clause found in many municipal charters and modeled on similar language in the U.S. Constitution governing Congress — historically interpreted to cover contested elections and candidate eligibility disputes, not general disciplinary authority over sitting members’ conduct. Whether it can support a broader reading is untested in La Plata specifically and remains unresolved.
James, for her part, laid out a more detailed due-process objection live at the meeting than her later public statements captured: that a censure taking effect immediately, without identifying which specific Charter provision, rule or code section was violated, and without a defined process for responding to that specific violation, fails “even the most basic due process requirements.”
Minutes before the final vote, she attempted to read a prepared list of what she described as council actions affecting the mayor’s role dating back to her May 2025 swearing-in. A council member raised a point of order to block it as outside the special meeting’s agenda; when James, presiding as chair, allowed herself to continue, another member formally appealed her ruling under the council’s own rules of procedure. The full council — not including James, whose ruling was under appeal — voted 4-0 to overrule her and exclude the list from the record.
The meeting also produced a substantive, less adversarial exchange that adds nuance to the underlying factual dispute over MDOT’s invitation. Councilman Gregory Sampson pressed James on whether her July 29 email — which said the council’s designation “does not align with the intent” of MDOT’s invitation — implicitly also undercut Town Manager Chuck Stevens, since he had relayed MDOT’s guidance to the council in good faith. James responded that she was the lone dissenting vote on the council’s July 28 nomination and that MDOT’s original June 11 invitation had cited her personally, referencing her “commitment to bold safety action” and prior experience serving on a similar coalition — the basis, she said, for her view that the invitation was hers specifically, not a critique of Stevens’ conduct.
The meeting ran roughly two and a half hours, adjourning at 8:29 p.m. after the final 4-1 censure vote. Neither the closed session’s legality nor the council’s underlying censure authority was resolved that night, and neither has been resolved since.
