Recite the Pledge of Allegiance … or leave

• Share on
• 
• 
• 
• 

OTB Chairman Dennis Bassett. Photo by Garrett Looker.

If you want to walk into Batavia Downs, the price of admission is pretty obvious: You’ve got to have a few pennies for the slot machines.

But the board of directors that runs the casino and harness track has decided there’s a new cost if you want to hear them discuss the business of the publicly owned Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corporation:

Stand up, place your hand over your heart and recite the Pledge of Allegiance loud enough for Chairman Dennis Bassett to hear you. 

If you don’t? Bassett doesn’t want you in the boardroom. 

“If you’re not going to do it, we would like for you not to be in the boardroom when we recite the Pledge of Allegiance,” he said. 

Donate to support our nonprofit newsroom

Bassett, OTB’s Rochester representative, has served on the board for more than a decade and became chairman late last year after a reshuffling done via state law. A retired executive from Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, Bassett can be seen in television advertisements for Batavia Downs.

Let’s take a step back.

I arrived Thursday morning at Batavia Downs to attend the 10 a.m. meeting of the OTB’s board of directors in my capacity as a reporter for Investigative Post. This is routine business: Investigative Post has been publishing stories about OTB since December 2018 and I’ve been attending board meetings off and on since I added the agency to my beat last year. 

Thursday’s agenda was routine — financial updates, hotel expansion updates, hiring an IT company — so I was not expecting any news. I was there primarily to observe and speak to some board members afterwards. 

But then, at the start of the meeting, Bassett made a surprising statement: Anyone who was unwilling or unable to say the Pledge of Allegiance should step out of the room.

I’ve been covering public meetings for nearly a decade in cities and small towns in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, South Carolina and New York. Never have I heard a public official — young or old, Republican or Democrat — attempt to banish someone for not saying the Pledge. I quickly put Bassett’s words out of my mind and did what I’ve been doing for nearly nine years: I stood, faced the flag, put my hands in my pockets and said the Pledge to myself.

After the meeting, I learned Bassett had been talking about me.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said as soon as I approached him to chat about non-Pledge of Allegiance matters. “Why can’t you put your hand on your heart and recite the Pledge? Because if you can’t do that, I would like for you not to be in here when the Pledge is recited. You’re insulting the board.”

I was taken aback. I told him I hadn’t realized I was required to recite the Pledge. He agreed that I wasn’t.

But, he made himself clear: If I didn’t, I shouldn’t be in the room.

Back at my office, I picked up the phone. I first called Paul Wolf, an attorney who’s an expert on New York’s open records and open meetings laws. He runs the New York Coalition for Open Government.

“What the heck? I’ve never heard of that,” he said after I told him what happened at the meeting. “Every public body is allowed to have rules of conduct, but I’ve never heard that someone not saying the Pledge is something someone can be removed for.”

I next called Shoshanah Bewlay, executive director of the state’s Committee on Open Government, the agency that issues legal opinions on matters pertaining to the Freedom of Information Law and the Open Meetings Law. 

Requiring people attending a meeting to repeat the pledge is “certainly not covered by the Open Meetings Law,” she said.

I checked. It’s not. 

In fact, the law says nothing at all about who can or cannot attend public meetings, only that New Yorkers should be able to “attend and listen to the deliberations and decisions that go into the making of public policy.”

Unless someone is causing a disturbance, they’re allowed to attend public meetings, Bewlay said.

“You should be allowed to peacefully observe and attend,” she said. “If someone tries to prevent you, they should have a good reason.”

Later in the afternoon in a phone conversation, Bassett said no one would be removed from board meetings if they didn’t say the Pledge. He said it was simply “a request from the board.”

He went on to say that my refusal to submit to his request would make it difficult to build relationships with board members. 

Absent my cooperation, he said, “I would rather you come to the meeting after the Pledge of Allegiance is said.”

J. Dale Shoemaker