By admin 
The latest specially called meeting of Chapin Town Council came to an abrupt end when town council members walked out on the mayor.
Read more Deportation flight delays, ICE’s last-minute adds leave Haitian officials scrambling
The town council met in the second unscheduled meeting of the week Thursday at Chapin Town Hall, but after meeting in a closed-door executive session, the meeting soon broke down.
Four other members of the council left the dais — and the building — after Mayor Bill Mitchell called a five-minute recess during a heated exchange.
“It’s illegal for you to leave this meeting improperly,” Mitchell told his colleagues as they got up to leave.
“You know what, arrest us,” Councilwoman Vicky Shealy said as the meeting came to an impromptu end.
Thursday’s meeting was the latest called because of disputes between Mitchell and the rest of town council over the town’s legal representation and other issues. The council had last met only two days earlier to vote to hire a new town attorney over the mayor’s objections.
The latest meeting was ostensibly called to discuss “the contract of the Current Municipal Clerk,” but following a closed session on “personnel matters,” Mitchell began the open session saying he believed a vote on the clerk’s position would violate his powers to oversee town employees and would be invalid, a stance he’s taken on other measures passed by the council.
When Councilman Warren Burritt questioned that interpretation of the law, Mitchell told him he was disrupting the meeting and called the town’s chief of police into the room.
“It is illegal for anybody sitting in those chairs [in the public gallery] or up here to disrupt this meeting,” Mitchell said. “This is not a place were people just have arguments… If you disrupt this meeting, I will try several times to calm it down. If that doesn’t work, I will ask the chief of police to escort you out of this building.”
Burritt later tried to make a motion for the meeting to adjourn, which was seconded by Councilwoman Ainslee Bost. Mitchell called that an “illegal motion” because Burritt hadn’t been recognized to speak leading to a back-and-forth with the council members and Mitchell calling for a five-minute recess.
“I’ll give you one chance to get your motions under control,” Mitchell said.
After Mitchell got up and left the dais, Burritt reiterated his call to adjourn the meeting, and the rest of the council got up and left, over Mitchell’s objections.
On the livestream posted to the town’s Facebook page, Mitchell can be seen sitting alone in the council chambers for five minutes during the “recess” before he resumed the meeting by calling his colleagues’ actions illegal.
Read more ‘We have to be vigilant,’ Columbia remembers 25th anniversary of 9/11
“I don’t know if our ordinances speak to such behavior, I don’t know if it’s ever happened in the history of our town, but it disrupted a meeting and at the very least it’s unethical,” the mayor said.
Speaking to The State on Friday, council members said they felt the mayor’s threat to remove them shut down any possibility of discussion.
“It was embarrassing, it was horrible,” Shealy said of how the meeting played out. “But when someone threatens you, it makes it hard to sit there… He can’t do that. It’s against the law. And he won’t let us get a word in edgewise, Warren tried and he just ignores us.”
Burritt told The State he and his colleagues still intend to vote to replace the town’s clerk, but he wants to get a legal opinion that the council is on solid ground to make decisions about who fills the position.
“The mayor had interpreted a law to say that everyone [on the council] votes to hire someone, but the only one who could fire them would be him, and we just disagree with that,” he said.
Burritt said he would have moved to table the discussion for the night, but “He gave us a 15-minute speech on civics and what his powers are again, and we’re getting tired of hearing him speak,” Burritt said. “It’s the council’s meeting, it’s not just Bill’s meeting.”
Mitchell told The State that the town expects their elected representatives to be able to work together.
“It’s a disappointing place to be that a municipal council are unable to work well together at this moment,” Mitchell said. “We have tried negotiating many times and you can see it’s apparent that there’s discord between members of the council.”
But he reiterated that he believes the recent ordinances the council has passed are invalid because they encroach on his powers as mayor, and that he doesn’t intend to execute or enforce them.
“I have now stopped cold in their tracks multiple ordinances trying to transfer authority to the whole of council and none of these ordinances will be practiced, we will continue to function without them being enforced,” he said. If the council wants to change the town’s form of government, “that’s a decision the citizens have to make. You can’t change it by ordinance.”
The mayor said he hopes the town can have a public workshop soon with the S.C. Municipal Association on their respective roles in town government. That meeting was approved at a previous council meeting, but no date for the workshop has been set.
Read more One of America’s best roadside diners is in Kansas, according to USA Today