Abby Whitt
Contributing writer
District A Supervisor Sara Bohn said at last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting that she believes her continued censure has become “discriminatory.”
The board voted to censure Bohn on Dec. 16, 2024, citing “the consistent failure of Board of Supervisors member Sara Bohn to attend in person, the meetings of the Board of Supervisors, as well as her absences from meetings of the Montgomery County Public Service Authority and of the New River Valley Community Services Board, to which she was appointed” in the official resolution.
“If my attendance is 90% or above,” Bohn said in the December discussion, “for all of my meetings I would think that that would be okay considering personal reasons that I’ve been going through for the last two years, the divorce that I’m going through with my husband which has been very difficult and I haven’t hidden that from you and I’ve always been an open book.”
The News Messenger reported other reasons Bohn was absent or attended meetings virtually, including a wedding and death in the family, and a special family trip to other countries.
“I didn’t think that it would be,” Bohn said in December, “that attending virtually, was a bad thing. Up until that point, no one ever told me that attending virtually was a bad thing.”
Bohn said during her individual report on May 27 that having seven people on the board has been a tradition for decades.
“There’s a reason why there are seven supervisors on this board,” she said. “There’s a reason why we decided to have all seven supervisors on the PSA board.”
Her fellow board members, Bohn said, have not supported having a public hearing about appointing an additional member to the PSA board.
“I personally think that this whole censure thing is inappropriate to have at this moment in time. I believe I should be appointed to the PSA board because important things are discussed on the PSA board, like the budget,” Bohn said. “…Why am I being punished six months later by not being reappointed? Personally, I believe that this is discrimination in some form. I don’t know what that is because when the censureship came into place,” she said, “there were no time limits on it, either. I personally don’t think a discriminatory resolution should ever be enacted.”
