It’s time to award another Closed Door Award. This one goes to City Manager Jean Ann McGrane and Economic Development Director Robert McKenna for shutting out the public to a meeting that had a majority of the city council present and thus fell under the Open Meetings Law.
According to Jenny Loeb, a community organizer for Community Voices Heard, she and one of her organization’s members, Maretta Melvin, endeavored to attend a meeting this evening the council held to discuss the Master Plan. Mayor Valentine, Councilwoman Angelo, and Councilwoman Bell were already in attendance when Ms. Loeb and Ms. Melvin were asked to leave.
Marge Bell expressed concerns that it should be an open meeting and that closing it would be a violation of the law.
However, both Robert McKenna and Jean Ann McGrane told Ms. Loeb the meeting did not fall under the Law and that she and Ms. Melvin were not welcome. Ms. Loeb explains that “they said it was considered ‘staff providing information.’ We asked if the Council members were speaking as well, and they confirmed that they were.”
To shed light on how the City Council broke the Open Meetings Law, I turn to Robert Freeman, Executive Director of the New York State Committee on Open Government. The following text is transcribed from the video below, recorded during Mr. Freeman’s visit to the Newburgh Free Library in the fall of 2006.
What is a meeting?
The Open Meetings Law applies to meetings of public bodies. A public body is a group of two or more, that would either be elected or appointed to carry out some sort of governmental function collectively as a body.
Like a city council, a school board, a town board, a planning board, a zoning board of appeals, a state assembly or senate; all of those groups of people, who function collectively as a group, constitute public bodies required to comply with the Open Meetings Law.
But back in 1977, the law defined the term “meeting” to mean the formal convening of a public body for the purpose of officially transacting public business.
Well, gee, all over the state, all kinds of boards and councils and committees were saying, look, we’re not conducting a meeting, we’re just going to talk. We’re not going to vote, we’re not going to take action. We won’t be transacting public business. This isn’t a meeting, it’s a workshop, it’s a work session, it’s a study session, it’s everything but a meeting.
Now, I have no idea whether there’s anybody here today who might have been on the city council in 1978, but the contention was that the so-called work session was held solely for the purpose of discussion and there’s no intention to take action were not meetings, and that they fell beyond the coverage of the Open Meetings Law.
Well, anybody here from the Times Herald Record?
Well, they sued. And they won. And the case went all the way to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, and the Court of Appeals said very simply, that any time a majority – a quorum, if you will – gathers for the purpose of conducting public business, that’s a meeting covered by the Open Meetings Law, even if there’s no intent to take action, irrespective of the manner in which the gathering may be characterized as.
Now, I know that the city still has work sessions, but they’re open to the public.
Right? Damn well better be. They have to be open.
Thus, even though the meeting was characterized as “staff providing information,” because there was a quorum, the meeting should have been open to the public.
Ms. Loeb believes the council may have been trying to escape her organization’s scrutiny. CVH is engaged in a campaign “to get [the council] to support better protections for affordable housing for Newburgh residents in the Master Plan.”
Will it take another lawsuit to assure the council complies with the law?
