The UNC Board of Governors decided in closed session on Friday to give pay raises to several chancellors across the UNC System.

Now that information is finally being made public.

UNC Chancellor Carol Folt and NC State Chancellor Randy Woodson were two of 12 recipients of a pay increase, according to information released on Monday. Folt will now have a base salary of $570,000 and Woodson will make $590,000 per year as his base salary. The chancellors who did not receive a pay raise were among the most-recently hired chancellors in the system or had received a pay raise earlier this year.

But the way in which the board authorized those pay raises drew criticism on Friday.

Just a week before, the board had elected Margaret Spellings to succeed current President Tom Ross, when Ross is removed from the post early next year. It was a meeting happening just four days after the board Chair John Fennebresque, who led the controversial search for Spellings, had resigned.

And the meeting was fairly straight forward, until the board emerged from a two-and-a-half-hour closed session.

Before the board adjourned, George Sywassink delivered the Personnel and Tenure Committee report including that the board had authorized changes to salaries of some chancellors in the UNC System. But the information regarding who would receive the salary increase and how much the salary would be adjusted was not addressed or affirmed in open session.

Jonathan Jones is the Director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition, and he says that is where the board does not see eye-to-eye with the North Carolina open meetings law.

“The real problem there is that any time the Board of Governors, or any other public body that’s subject to open meetings law, takes action in a closed session,” Jones says, “they have to come out and affirm that action in a public session.

“If they take a vote in a closed meeting, when they adjourn that closed meeting there has to be an open portion. And during that open portion of the meeting, they have to affirm whatever it was they just decided in the closed session so that the public knows.”

System spokesperson Joni Worthington told reporters the information would not become public record until the individuals affected were informed, according to what she had been told by the system’s general counsel Thomas Shanahan. Jones says there are no provisions for this in the law.

“Neither the public records law nor the open meetings law has any kind of exemption for notifying employees of an action that was taken in closed session that might affect them,” Jones says. “Once they take that action, it does become a public record and it should be accessible.”

Jones went on to say, “The meetings law is clear. You can’t take an action in closed session without affirming it in an open session.”

Worthington wrote in an e-mail to WCHL that, “Our legal counsel does not believe that the Open Meetings Act supports the opinion that all actions taken by a public body must be taken in open session.”

Worthington went on to say that the system is “mindful that State law requires us to keep employee personnel information confidential, with certain exceptions.”

Worthington adds, “Although employers may release information on current salary and prior salary changes, we do not think that information about salaries that have been authorized [but] not yet administratively implemented or even communicated to employees can be considered current.”

Jones says this is not the first time in recent weeks the board has possibly run afoul of open-records requirements, including the “emergency meeting” called in mid-October.

“They held an emergency meeting a couple of weeks ago to discuss a candidate for the Presidency of the UNC System,” Jones recalls. “That clearly was not an emergency. The meeting in and of itself did not comply with the laws requirements for an emergency meeting.”

Jones adds the “emergency meeting” was held at the SAS campus in Cary where the building locks after five o’clock.

“Meaning that folks who showed up after five o’clock couldn’t get to the meeting,” Jones says. “That’s also a serious problem and a violation of the meetings law.”

At that same meeting, the board was criticized for the rushed adjournment that followed a lengthy closed session.

“Every meeting that you have in closed session, when you decide to end the closed session you have to come out into open session again even if the only thing you’re going to do in the open session is adjourn the overall meeting,” Jones says. “When they did that during that emergency meeting, they held the open session before anyone in the public who was waiting to come into that portion of the meeting could get into the room.”

Jones says this track record does not bode well for the perception of the BOG.

“We’ve got this series of meetings over a period of time, two of them kind of close to each other, involving different issues,” Jones says, “where it just looks like the Board of Governors either doesn’t understand the responsibility under the open meetings law or is not committed to doing its work in a transparent way.”