Topeka ? Atty. Gen. Phill Kline and conservative members of the State Board of Education didn’t violate the Kansas Open Meetings Act by meeting secretly in February, a prosecutor decided Thursday.

In a 24-page report, Shawnee County Dist. Atty. Robert Hecht said no action would be taken against Kline and six Board of Education members.

Kline’s chief of staff, Eric Rucker, said the decision should end complaints about the meetings.

“It was in compliance with the open meetings law. District Attorney Hecht concurs with what we have always maintained,” Rucker said.

But the report prompted calls from two legislators and the Kansas Press Assn. for a change in the law.

“This decision points out that there is a gaping hole in the Kansas Open Meetings Act that must be plugged,” Doug Anstaett, executive director of the KPA, said.

Hecht was asked to investigate the meetings by Senate Democratic Leader Anthony Hensley and state Rep. Paul Davis, D-Lawrence. They said Thursday Kline still violated the spirit of the law.

“He needs to set a better example for public officials of all kind,” Davis said of Kline.

Rucker said the meetings complied with the law, “not what Senator Hensley wants it to be.”

Under the state open meetings law, meetings with a majority of a quorum of a public board must be held in public. A quorum on the education board is six members, and a majority of that is four.

On Feb. 8, Kline held two meetings with three members each. He and members who attended those meetings said Kline discussed school finance litigation and a proposal to put stickers on science books for public schools that say evolution is a theory and not a fact.

But several lawmakers and media groups, including the Lawrence Journal-World, questioned whether the meetings ran afoul of a 1998 legal opinion from the Attorney General’s Office.

That opinion stated it is illegal to hold a series of meetings that collectively would total a quorum of board members and where a common topic of discussion occurs.

Kline has said he complied with that portion of the law by not conveying discussion from one meeting to the other.

Hecht’s report said based on sworn statements from the board members and information provided by Kline that “no deliberations occurred, nor decisions were arrived at, either finally or tentatively” at the meetings.

Hensley and Davis said they may try to change the law this session to prohibit the kind of serial meetings that occurred between Kline and the board members.