For McComb Selectman Bob Maddox, the case of the mistaken vote can be put to rest.
For other board members, it might not be so simple.
At a city board meeting Tuesday, a 4-2 vote authorized the city to declare its intent to borrow up to $32 million for a much-needed wastewater treatment facility.
Maddox voted for the measure, but moments later had a change of heart and asked if he could switch his vote to oppose it.
The meeting proceeded without the vote being reconsidered.
Asked Wednesday if he was comfortable with his vote, Maddox replied, “Yes, I am. I didn’t get to change my vote, but I feel we’re moving forward in a positive manner.”
Others aren’t as sure.
The incident presents a potentially tricky situation for board members: They don’t want to prevent themselves from correcting their own votes in the event of a mistake, but they don’t want to their votes to be influenced by the rest of the board, either.
None of the selectmen questioned Maddox’s sincerity, but Selectman Robert Earl Smith said Wednesday his concern was that if Maddox had been allowed to recast his vote, similar maneuvers could be made intentionally in the future by others to strategically impact voting results.
“If you’re gonna do it one time, you have to do it all the time,” Smith said. “When you start letting people change their vote … If somebody wants something to go another way, can they change then?”
The dilemma, then, is when is it appropriate to allow a change.
At a board meeting earlier this month, Selectman Danny Esch asked that the minutes of a Jan. 8 board meeting be amended to note that he voted against the decision to hire the Malachi Group to work on city bonds.
“A change of mind is one thing, but a misquote is another,” Selectman Wade Lamb said Wednesday.
Esch said he wouldn’t be bothered by the precedent if Maddox challenged the minutes under the circumstances of Maddox’s vote, either.
“He could do the same thing to reflect his vote,”Esch said of Maddox. “All the votes are going to stand before the citizens.”
Esch said he was bothered that Maddox hadn’t been given that opportunity immediately.
“(City Attorney) “Bubber” White said ‘Yes, you can revisit that,’ ” Esch said. “But the mayor took it on his own to say no.”
Selectman Melvin Joe Johnson had a different take on Maddox’s change of heart, wondering whether Maddox was being pressured politically.
“I don’t know if he’s getting torched from some selectmen to change his vote,” Johnson said. “That’s what it seems like to me.”
Jan Schaeffer, a spokesperson for state Attorney General’s office, said there was nothing in state law specifically addressing when a vote change would be appropriate.
Schaeffer, citing a 1990 opinion in which a Southhaven alderman asked a similar question, said state law provides no statutory authority to rescind or change a vote after a meeting, and added that doing so could compromise the open meetings law.
“It would really be dependent on the rules or procedures adopted by the city,” she said.
Maddox, meanwhile, continued to push for unity among board members.
“We’ve got a lot of projects that we’re working on and it’s going to take a lot of working together,” he said. “Nothing should be on a personal basis. All these things have got to be discussed in a civil way. Here again, working together we can do a lot of things.”
