MOUNT VERNON – City Councilmembers can get together for social gatherings as long as they don’t discuss the city’s business, an expert on Ohio’s open meetings law told them at a special meeting Monday at City Hall.
Mark Altier, an attorney who formerly worked for the state auditor’s and attorney general’s offices, presented a modified version of the open meetings portion of a public records course he gave for elected officials.
If a group of council members get together for lunch but don’t have any intention of discussing public business, that’s OK, Altier said.
“Sometimes, people may see you together, they may assume that you're talking about public business and therefore raise issues with the public,” he said.
But unless they discuss or deliberate publicly, that is not a public meeting.
Any committee or subcommittee that the council creates becomes a separate public body that must comply with the requirements of the Open Meetings Act, he said. This includes a hybrid committee that includes council members and other members of the community.
“Just because they don't have final decision-making authority doesn't make them any less of a public body,” he said. “The act is not decision making. The act is not making decisions. It's deliberating or discussing.”
Council president Bruce Hawkins said the council has held breakfast meetings where community members are invited to attend and give input.
“We don’t deliberate. We just listen to what the community has to say. And is that a meeting?” he asked.
Altier said it’s not a meeting unless the council deliberates or discusses those issues themselves.
For executive sessions, he advised council to be specific on the reasons for the closed meeting. And while they can vote in public session to go into an executive session, they must wait until they leave the executive session to vote to return to the public meeting. No votes or decisions can be made in executive session, including those on personnel matters by the council.
The council can discuss any city business it wants to discuss during a regular council meeting. Only special meetings are restricted to what’s been posted on an agenda, he said.
Council can put rules restricting people making public comment at meetings from being abusive, profane or volatile. It can limit the time people get to speak and how many times an individual can speak. But it cannot prohibit a person from speaking based on what he or she is saying, Altier said.
