The January 18^th meeting of the Champaign City Council had a curious item on the agenda: approval of nearly seven and a half years of meeting minutes for Community Civic Events.  There were ninety sets of meeting minutes spanning from June 17, 2014 to November 6, 2021.

The Illinois Open Meetings Act (OMA) requires public bodies to approve their meeting minutes within 30 days or at their second subsequent regular meeting, and to make those approved minutes available to the public within 10 days of their approval (and post them to their website if they have one).  The purpose of this law is to ensure that records are corrected and finalized while the meetings are still in recent memory, and to ensure that the public has timely access to those records.

It is not clear how the Champaign City Council accumulated so many unapproved sets of minutes, for so long.

More concerning, perhaps, is that when the Champaign City Council approved the ninety sets of meeting minutes at Tuesday’s meeting, they approved them unanimously, and without any discussion.

OMA violations like this are not new in Champaign – in May of 2021, the Champaign City Council garnered attention from the Illinois Attorney General for failing to approve and post meeting minutes for eight months.  

Since there was no Council discussion at this occurrence or last, it seems the lateness of meeting minutes will continue to go unexplained.

It should be noted that only two of the seven City Council members who voted to approve the ninety sets of meeting minutes were in office when a large portion of those meetings took place.  In addition to not discussing the minutes in any way, the Council members seem to be willing to approve records about which they have no knowledge.