Reader Mail: Closed Sessions
Another reader wrote on Tuesday with some helpful research on the topic of closed sessions:
Here is an answer to question about the closed session litigation...
In order to close a meeting under the attorney-client privilege exception, the governing body must give a particularized statement describing the subject to be discussed. A general statement that the meeting is being closed to discuss pending or threatened litigation is
not sufficient.
...This comes from a open meeting law document found thru Google at the address given here...
http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/openmtg.pdf
Based on this little nugget, am I missing something here? (Seriously, am I off my rocker on this one???) I am not an attorney. I have never been involved in a situation that required my knowledge of the open meeting law. But I have known about the law. How can one not? If nothing else, it is just good ethics to follow everything laid out in it. And how is it that the powers that be, including our new city attorney missed this item with regard to the closed meetings.
And while we are on the subject of the open meeting law...
As I comb thru this site as well as the Maplewood Voices site, one comes across the items concerning the Open Meeting Law in the Schulz Report. Why is it that nothing has been done about the Open Meeting Law violations even though it has been freely admitted by the Mayor that these actions actually occur?
This just shows that the threesome plus our brilliant city manager really don't care about the laws much less anything concerning that dirty word known as ethics...
posted by Frostbrand @ 11:38 AM
8 Comments:
At 12:26 AM,
Anonymous said…
I have found that it seems like everyone is a self proclaimed expert on the open meeting law.
I have heard people claim that a chance meeting in the grocery store aisle where the only thing discussed is the quality of the lettace is a violation. Nonsense.
I have also heard claims that three elected officials sitting in the audience in three different parts of the room at a meeting is a violation. Hogwash.
You have to have a quorum, which is 3, have a meeting to not only discuss city business, but also to make decisions. There has to be give and take between members. One member giving orders or handing out information to other members hardly qualifies.
Now people like Schultz will make claims that some of this action is wrong, and maybe ethically it is. But that is a far cry from being illegal.
What get me though with this Maplewood situation is why don't all of these people making open meeting violation claims actually file a complaint with the appropriate people? Note that the County Attorney is not the appropriate party since she only can handle felony cases and open meeting violations are simple misdemeaners. The complaint is supposed to be filed with the city prosecutor who will be required to farm it out to another city prosecutor in another city.
What is that saying? Put your money where your mouth is?
At 12:50 PM,
Anonymous said…
Anonymous said " ...One member giving orders or handing out information to other members hardly qualifies."
(emphasis added)
Erik, is that you? You know, the mayor doesn't actually have the authority to give you orders.
At 12:32 PM,
Frostbrand said…
[Frostbrand posting, but just passing along a comment/response we received by e-mail from the original writer:]
To the anonymous poster who seems to think that everyone is a self proclaimed expert on the open meeting law...
As you can see if you carefully read my original post, I don't claim to be any type of expert on the open meeting law. Really, I don't claim to be an expert on much when it comes to city council matters. I know I have been put in my place a couple of times. And rightly so.
I can only imagine what it must have been like for Mr. Hjelle and others to have to learn all of the rules and regs it takes to run for city office. However, the rule book IS there. The members of the council as well as all of the candidates are responsible to learn those rules. One of those rules is the Open Meeting Law. A simple search in Google dragged it up. The language in it is pretty clear. I didn’t alter the language. I simply posted what is there. I am not an attorney. But the document is written in pretty plain English. Plain enough for the simplest city council member (current or potential) to understand. I don’t really think it takes a rocket scientist to understand it. If you do have trouble understanding it, then perhaps you should not have run for council.
As for the so called claims made by Schulz, from what I have read thru multiple sources, the Mayor as well as Mr. Hjelle admitted that they had violated the laws. There is nothing “ethical” about that. It seems pretty clear to me.
And while we are on the subject of ethics…That was a nice touch in your post. (Begin sarcasm …) I love electing people that care only about the letter of the law and don’t give a hoot about the spirit of the law or ethics. (End Sarcasm…) This was the icing on the cake for me!! This is why the three musketeers and their lackey are in the trouble that they are in. They don’t give a damn about ethics. That much is ever so clear. According to the fearsome threesome…It is in our power to elect Mr. Brilliant at 2:00 AM with one council member missing and 99% of the public fast asleep. Was it ethical? We don’t give a damn because it was legal. How do you spell ethical anyway?
The city motto on the front of the last newsletter read “Together we can”. Together to me means that we involve all FIVE of the council members in city business. However, the three stooges see otherwise…We will bring on as city manager whomever we want to. We have the majority. Therefore, we have the legal right. Forget about someone that all of us can agree on. We don’t care if that’s the RIGHT thing to do. We will do what we can LEGALLY do. The rest of it we’ll cover in secret meetings and by trading e-mail.
At 6:39 PM,
Anonymous said…
"I have also heard claims that three elected officials sitting in the audience in three different parts of the room at a meeting is a violation. Hogwash."
Actually, it is a violation. Council members who know they are attending the same event must take precautions to wnsure that the meeting law is not violated.
"You have to have a quorum, which is 3, have a meeting to not only discuss city business, but also to make decisions. There has to be give and take between members. One member giving orders or handing out information to other members hardly qualifies."
This is so wrong it is laughable. Of course it qualifies! That is the exact reason the law was enacted.
whoever posted that inane comment at the head of this page needs a lesson in MN law (to say nothing of ethics)
At 3:13 AM,
Anonymous said…
Again we are getting ethics mixed up with law. Many things are unethical, but most of them are not illegal.
It is not an open meeting violation for three elected officials to sit in an audience at a meeting. Council members need to take NO precautions. Now if these members want to start talking with each other, then that is a different story which I did not raise. Please read my postings more carefully.
One member giving orders is not illegal. Let me give you a more clear example. If the mayor sends out a letter to the council members stating her budget targets for 2007, this is no problem. There has been no discussion. There has been no debate. End of story.
If the scenarios I described were in fact open meeting law violations, everything would grind to a complete hault.
Heaven forbid, maybe council members would have to schedule time to shop at Cub Foods for fear that three of them might be in the building at the same time.
How is it that 4 of the 5 New Brighton council members attended the last League of Cities meeting out of state a few months ago? I think it was in Utah. Hurry... someone file a complaint!
At 9:35 AM,
Frostbrand said…
Our 3 AM poster is correct on some points. Chance meetings and merely being in the same room certainly don't constitute open meeting violations.
The courts have also held that it's reasonable for some discussions to take place outside of official meetings, and that this is also a key part of practical governance.
On the other hand, when discussions and deliberations among a quorum are used to work out a course of action outside of the public eye, THAT is a violation.
Let me give you a hypothetical. When Longrie named Copeland as interim manager, her two puppets immediately voted for him, without spending any time asking about his qualifications, raising any questions about his experience, asking about any of the red flags on his resume, etc. We are to believe that they immediately approved a complete stranger, rather than a known city staff person as had been expected. They did not so much as blink at Diana's motion.
So either
(a) Hjelle and Cave don't give a crap about their duties, and simply defer to Longrie's judgement, or
(b) Longrie had informed them ahead of time of her plan (perhaps both at the same time, perhaps serially -- doesn't matter), and persuaded them to accept her friend Mr. Copeland.
In the former case, Hjelle and Cave are just lousy city councilors (which I do think is the case anyhow); in the latter, they violated the open meeting law.
At 4:07 PM,
Anonymous said…
"One member giving orders is not illegal. Let me give you a more clear example. If the mayor sends out a letter to the council members stating her budget targets for 2007, this is no problem. There has been no discussion. There has been no debate. End of story."
This example is not illegal. Nor is it one member 'giving orders'. A Mayor in a plan B city runs the meetings and generally attends to ribbon cuttings and other promotional events. Said Mayor has no more authority than any other council person. One vote.
Attempting to bypass the law by creating mythical situations that purportedly do not 'technically' fall under the law is unethical. Not understanding what is actually illegal is lazy and foolish. Discussing and even suggesting actions that might be made among a quorum whether they are in the same room, blogging, emailing, on the phone, text messaging or communicating in any other way to avoid public discussion at an open meeting is a violation of the law.
At 4:34 AM,
Anonymous said…
Frostbrand is starting to see that Longrie, Cave, and Hjelle are operating like a political party, the same as how Wiger and Lille operate. This is how smart people work within the system to get large amounts of work done in a resonable timeframe. Now their level of loyalty and organization probably makes some people mad. Well tough. It ain't their problem that the previous Maplewood council members were never this well organized. (yeah I have attended meetings of the previous council and lots of talk, no action)
What you see is the classic textbook scenario of how a party operates. Typically members have areas or issues that they are interested in. They recognize that they cannot have their fingers in every single issue all the time. They divide up things amongst themselves. They recognize that by providing reasonable support for other members initiatives, they will recieve inkind support for their initiatives. If this didn't happen at the legislature, there is no way they could pass a $20 billion budget in 5 months.
So the scenario that Frostbrand lays out on the manager hiring is a little bit off. I believe that only one or two of the three council members were involved in the detailed decisions that led to the manager replacement. It was no secret that three members wanted this done. Anything brought forward by only one or two members to accomplish this goal would most certainly be supported by the third member. Could you even fathom a scenario where one of the three would have voted no on manager replacement? No.
So is this scenario an open meeting violation? If I did my math correctly, we have one or two members who assembled the details, and the third just voted on whatever showed up at the table as long as it was reasonable. Doesn't look like open meeting violation to me. It looks like smart political party thinkers.
Are you a lousy council member for deferring to the judgement of another member? Hardly. Members defer to the judgement of others all the time. Just a few months ago, Jueneman was making a speech on the dispatching issue if I recall correctly. Erik said point blank that he was not nearly as informed on the issue as Jueneman and that he deferred to her opinion on the issue. No member can be an expert on everything. Deferring to another members opinion is not the sign of being a lousy member.
For the Plan B experts, yes this form of government gives everyone one vote. In the legislature, every member has a vote also. But as in the legislature, this city council has chosen to appoint a majority leader of sorts and a majority of the coucnil has made this person responsible for certain things they wished to see completed. This is not bypassing the law whatsoever. If a majority agrees to this delegation, then it is perfectly legal. The constitution doesn't require a Senate Majority leader, but one exists there because the majority sees value in having a leader address certain things on behalf of the body.
Let me use another Plan B city as an example. Law says that the council shall fill vacancies of council seats. In North Saint Paul, the council has chosen to rest the responsibility for filling vacancies in the hands of the Mayor. The law says nothing about the mayor having this role but as far as they are concerned, this is how they have done it and this is how they are going to keep on doing it. The mayor picks someone, and the council has a rubber stamp of a vote to make it legal. Is the mayor giving orders as to who to appoint? Yes. So is North Saint Paul bypassing the law? No.
Bottom line is that the mayor has as much or as little power at a majority wishes to give them in a Plan B city. How much or how little is given to one member is not something that can be rated as good or bad.
If giving one member more power than other members is wrong, then what about these cities that have subcommittees made up of smaller numbers of members? That's giving some members more power than others. I don't see anyone going around claiming that this is illegal.
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