The Winston-Salem Journal

We’re glad that the acting chairman of the UNC system board acknowledges error in his board’s approving salary increases for 12 chancellors in the system behind closed doors last month. Now the board of governors should walk the talk and immediately release minutes of that meeting.

Ironically, it was state legislative leaders, who often lack transparency in their dealings, who called the system board it appoints on the carpet last week for its secrecy.

“I think we made an error,” acting Chairman W. Louis Bissette told the Joint Legislative Commission on Governmental Operations last week, the Journal’s John Hinton reported. “I apologize.”

“My bad” doesn’t get it. Release the minutes, now.

The question at hand was whether the board complied with the state’s open meetings law when it voted for the salary increases. We contend that the board was not in compliance. That law generally allows public bodies to discuss personnel matters behind closed doors, but requires votes in open session, the Journal and The News & Observer of Raleigh reported.

Board officials indicate they have to wait until their next meeting, on Dec. 10, to approve the minutes before releasing any parts of the salary discussions.

The wait is unacceptable, considering that the closed meeting in question was held last month and media outlets have been requesting the minutes for some time now. The board can and should find a way to release those minutes sooner. They pushed the bounds of the open meetings law at their leisure, and now they must make amends in a timely fashion.

All we know now is that the board voted, apparently by a show of hands, to authorize UNC system President Tom Ross to implement the raises. As far as we know, there was no roll call vote.

The chancellors receiving raises include Elwood Robinson of Winston-Salem State University, Lindsay Bierman of the UNC School of the Arts and Sheri Everts of Appalachian State University. Certainly, some, if not many, of the 12 chancellors in question deserved some salary increase. But the increases of 8 to 19 percent from public funds, in a time when the legislature and board are cutting back on the system in other ways, demanded a full public airing that was not given.

Amazingly, Bissette said that, “We’ve got a lot of important things to do on this board to have so much controversy over the question of whether or not we did something in closed session or open session.”

Apparently, he hasn’t dropped into any of the journalism classes at the system’s schools, especially at its flagship university in Chapel Hill.

State Sen. Floyd McKissick, D-Durham, rightly noted that the board’s vote on the pay raises should have been done in open session. “I believe in openness,” McKissick said. “I believe in transparency.”

So do we. The board must release those minutes now.