Vacuum

If you are interested in going to public meetings, you must be interested in advance

The Michigan Open Meetings Act requires 18 hours advance notice of special meetings, and even less time (though I am not clear how much less time) for special meetings of committees. Thus, if you were not on a mailing list (with a relatively small number of people on the list), you did not receive notice directly of this meeting which is needed to resolve the City of Ann Arbor and the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority's mutual disagreements over the city budget.

I follow this primarily through the exhaustively detailed reporting of my current coworking group member Dave Askins at the Ann Arbor Chronicle, the timely reporting of my former coworker Ryan Stanton at AnnArbor.com, and the new news beat that my former coworker James Dickson is carving out at the Ann Arbor Journal, and the editorial direction that home town friend John Hilton directs at the monthly Ann Arbor Observer.

From time to time, the autonomous collective of Damn Arbor pitches in, with Ben Connor Barrie most likely to be the townie and grad student voice of civic news gathering. That weblog is in the tradition of previous efforts, notably Rob Goodspeed's Goodspeed Update, the autonomous collective and voice of Julie Weatherbee at Arbor Update, and a long-anonymous Julia Lipman at Ann Arbor is Overrated. 

This is all shorthand to say that I hope you are going to this meeting, if you care about it, and that if you care enough about it to want to know that it exists without me telling you about it you have to ask to be informed in advance.

Ypsilanti, Michigan to adopt more stringent Open Meetings Act rules

YPSILANTI - A very straightforward yet revolutionary approach to open meetings in Ypsilanti says that every subcommittee of City Council must abide by the Michigan Open Meetings Act - including providing advance notice of meetings - just in case enough council members show up to form a quorum.

Ypsilanti Citizen story:

The OMA resolution, which was added to council’s agenda at 5 p.m. on Oct. 20, was discussed in relation to the approval of the Ypsilanti Downtown Development Authority bylaws - a separate agenda item at the meeting.

Murdock said the resolution is simply about “having meetings where decisions are made open to the public.”

Although he had previous discussions with City Manager Ed Koryzno during Council’s goal-setting sessions in January, Murdock moved forward with the resolution Oct. 20, when the DDA violated the Open Meetings Act earlier in the month by having a quorum, or more than seven members of the board, participate at a planning committee meeting.

the Advance Ypsilanti PAC notes that the resolution snuck in at the last possible minute

Sadly, the process by which this open meetings resolution was enacted is exactly the opposite of an open process. This is not just ironic, but suspect.

For instance, consider that this resolution was sent to the city clerk and posted to the council packets at 4:16 p.m. the day of the city council meeting, less than 3 hours before council was to convene. AY PAC asks ‘why’? There was no emergency, no timeline that needed to be met on this issue. There was no pressing need that forced this to be addressed and resolved THAT NIGHT.

If anyone can inform AY PAC as to why this was so urgent that it needed to be addressed in a timeline that included NO opportunity for public comment and little reflection by council, we welcome the information.

The back story is the Ypsi DDA meeting in October 2008 which was held in closed session, in evident violation of the Open Meetings Act.  From YpsiNews (Steve Pierce) at the time:

(October 7, 2008) During a meeting of the Ypsilanti Downtown Development, the DDA board violated not one, but two sections of the Open Meetings Act.

The Director of the Ypsilanti DDA, Brian Vosburg, called an emergency closed session meeting to be held on Friday, October 3, 2008 at 12 noon. The purpose of the meeting was to meet with DDA attorney Tammie Tischler.

The DDA Director said in the meeting notice the “Closed Session (is) to consider material exempt from discussion or disclosure by state or federal statute - (Open Meetings Act 15.268, Section 8(h))”

However, neither the DDA Director nor the DDA attorney would cite which state or federal statute exempts the DDA from the Open Meetings Act. Failing to publicly state the reason for a closed session is a violation of the Open Meetings Act.

On the use of email among Ann Arbor City Council members during public meetings

I continue to be utterly baffled by the way politics works in this town.

The latest comes from documents obtained by FOIA of emails sent among members of city council during the council public meetings.  These messages provide council members with a sub rosa back channel to discuss items on the public agenda and evidently to tease (or ridicule) members of council that they don't agree with.

UPDATE: Two Ann Arbor News stories by Judy McGovern:

Some question appropriateness of mocking e-mail banter during Ann Arbor City Council meetings

Sent from city e-mail accounts, the messages were released by the city in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center.

The Detroit-based law center was seeking communication about the city's planned underground parking structure on Fifth Avenue. What it got, in addition, were a series of live e-mail exchanges among council members during three meetings in February and March.

Some of the messages discuss business on the council's agenda - such as whether a vote will be postponed - but more often they spoofed the proceedings.

Not all Ann Arbor City Council meeting e-mails were horseplay

In addition to quietly poking fun at individuals and groups before them, some Ann Arbor City Council members apparently used their city e-mail accounts during meetings to discreetly discuss city business.

I don't know who all has sent in FOIA requests yet, or what will be printed - the best guess I have at this point is that something will show up in the Sunday paper.  I've seen copies of what is evidently a very selectively edited set of messages from one meeting, in which one member of council sends email to most but not all members of council, awarding a "golden vomit award" to a council member not included on the email.  Is that teasing, ridicule, or an effort to influence future voting?  Hard to say.

The Michigan Open Meetings Act is not clear on the status of email communications as meetings.  An article in the Citizen Media Law Project site says

Governmental bodies may hold meetings by by written, telephonic, electronic, wireless, or other virtual means. However, an electronic meeting is still subject to the notice requirements and must be held at a designated place and time. While the law is not certain on this point, it appears that email communications between members of a governmental body may constitute a meeting if they involve deliberation on public business.

There's Open Meetings Act litigation underway in Texas, where the questions of balancing First Amendment rights to speech threaten to change laws across the country.  I don't understand all the repercussions, but here's the story from the Austin American-Statesman paper:

It started as a minor prosecution of two Alpine City Council members accused of discussing city business in private e-mails and not, as Texas law requires, in a public forum.

Now, with a recent U.S. appeals court ruling, the 2004 incident is mushrooming into a national issue — bringing denunciations from open-government advocates who fear the decision will cripple laws that ban elected officials from conducting public business behind closed doors.

The controversy surrounds a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the Texas Open Meetings Act compromised the Alpine council members' free speech rights and may have to be overturned or rewritten.

The Big Bend Sentinel, the local paper for Alpine, TX, notes that this case may reach the Supreme Court based on the intervention of attorney generals from multiple states.

ALPINE – The recent federal appeals court ruling in an Alpine Texas Open Meetings Act case that a public official’s right to free speech is the same as a private citizens may eventually find its way to the Supreme Court of the United States, an attorney in the matter said this week.

“Nineteen states have weighed in saying it (the ruling) could change their open meetings laws,” Alpine attorney Rod Ponton said. “That makes it a national issue that would need to be decided by the Supreme Court.”

On April 24, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in New Orleans, Louisiana, reversed a ruling by U.S. District Judge Rob Junell, who initially heard the civil lawsuit brought by former Alpine City Council members Dr. Avinash Rangra and Anna Monclova.

As I noted I expect more on this issue in the Sunday June 7 2009 news.