Council Failure to Approve Meeting Minutes a Years-Long Problem

Urbana, Illinois City Attorney (right) argues that the City of Urbana is not required to post meeting minutes online because, according to him, the City website is not maintained by full-time staff. (also pictured: Council member James Quisenberry, City Administrator Carol Mitten)

The Illinois Attorney General has entered into its third review of the Urbana, Illinois City Council in as many years for their persistent failure to make meeting minutes publicly available.

The Open Meetings Act (OMA) requires public bodies to record minutes of their meetings and approve those minutes within 30 days or at their second subsequent meeting, whichever is later. The OMA also requires public bodies to post approved minutes to their websites, if the public body “has a website that the full-time staff of the public body maintains”.

The Urbana City Council meets several times per month, so they should be on a 30 day schedule, at the very slowest. However, as anyone who has tried to find meeting documents on the City website can attest, one generally has to scroll back several months to find the most recently posted set of meeting minutes.

For members of the public desiring to see a summary of the actions of their elected officials, such as votes on important issues, the lack of documentation can be frustrating. As the months pass, Council votes for approval of minutes lose meaning as the meetings are no longer fresh in memory.

It is exactly this type of delay that permitted City Clerk Phyllis Clark to illegally fabricate a Council vote in December of 2020. Then, because the Council unlawfully delayed approval and posting of the meeting minutes, the fabricated vote count could not be discovered by the public until after the 60 day time limit to submit a complaint to the Attorney General.

This isn’t a new problem. The Attorney General Public Access Counselor (PAC) has processed complaints directed at the Urbana City Council about late, never approved, and/or never posted meeting minutes for numerous meetings in 2021, 2022, and 2023. The PAC has at least three separate reviews currently in progress, but final determinations have not been issued, even for a review initiated over two years ago.

The latest investigation began on January 5^th, 2023 when Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Silver issued letters to the Urbana City Council and the Cunningham Township Board, seeking information about nineteen recent meetings that appeared to violate the requirements of the OMA.

In one of the ongoing PAC reviews, City Attorney David Wesner claimed that the City doesn’t have adequate staff to keep up with meeting minutes. However, Check CU has noted that the City of Urbana has over 250 employees, and as many as nineteen individuals who help prepare meeting documents for its various boards and commissions. At the same time that the City Council has failed to stay up to date with posting of meeting minutes, City staff have made thousands of social media posts, often containing graphics created by City staff.

Check CU also notes that numerous smaller Illinois public bodies, with substantially fewer staff, regularly and consistently approve meeting minutes at their subsequent meeting without further delay.

Wesner also argued that the City of Urbana does not have “a website that the full-time staff of the public body maintains”, despite that being conspicuously untrue. In his convoluted reasoning, Wesner argued that because the Urbana City Clerk handles Council meeting minutes, and because the Clerk isn’t the full-time developer for the entire City of Urbana website, that the OMA provision did not apply to the City of Urbana.

The two most recent investigation letters issued on January 5^th by Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Silver are provided below: