I recently ran into an interesting scenario of how the law of unintended consequences is alive and well:
A board of directors with a government-based historical society. Several of the board members - all of whom are unpaid volunteers - formed into subcommittees to work on various projects. The board meetings and any subcommittee meetings are covered by the state open meeting law. As a result, all meetings have to be posted and open to the public and all decisions must be made in an open forum.
Fair enough. Nobody wants a return to decisions cooked in smoke-filled rooms. Matters then get interesting.
Overall coordination is helped if the various subcommittees know what the other subcommittees are doing so an idea is proposed: Have a rolling e-mail in which each subcommittee reports on the results of its meetings. That way, people can learn of progress without having to wait until the next board meeting.
Not so fast.
It turns out that the subcommittees cannot send updates to one another because the lawyers fear that if enough updates are passed from board member to board member, that could constitute a quorum and the passing around of e-mailed updates could be construed as a de facto meeting. The practice would thus violate the open meeting law even if no decisions are made and the messages are solely reports on the results of subcommittee meetings that have already been held.
I have no reason to question the opinion of the lawyers. It does make me wonder, however, if the framers of the law truly intended such results.
4 comments:
Michael, one potential workaround could be to post those ongoing messages on a publicly accessible wiki with a clearly labeled link from the agency's home page.
Jethro,
That's a great idea. I'll pass that along to the lawyers and the techies. Thanks!
Jethro's comment is a good one.
I am confused though. If the subcommittees are covered by the open meetings law, then any decision they make is simply a matter of the minutes. Why can't minutes be shared electronically? Heaven forbid someone actually read the minutes of a previous meeting.
The Engineer,
As I understand it, sharing the minutes is not a problem. If board/subcommittee members pass along their updates of the meetings, then - so the reasoning goes - their communication may create a quorum and a new meeting will be created. Simply passing along the minutes, however, would probably be safe so long as no other comments were made.
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