Approval of minutes is a fairly typical item to find on the meeting agenda for any public body in Illinois.  The minutes serve as a written accounting of the actions and votes of a public body, and the Open Meetings Act (OMA) requires all public bodies to create, approve, and publicly post their minutes within a certain time frame to be in compliance.  Many public bodies regularly and predictably approve their prior meeting’s minutes every time they assemble.

The City of Champaign has been very noticeably ignoring this requirement for most of the past year, and has regularly failed to comply for at least the past two years.  The OMA requires the City Council to approve their meeting minutes within 30 days, and to post the minutes within 10 days of approval so that the public can view them.  Champaign has violated this statutory requirement dozens of times, with instances of unapproved minutes currently stretching back to at least September of 2020.

Champaign resident Emily Klose has been expressing growing concern for the frequent violations and the ever growing length of time the Council has taken to post minutes.  Klose contacted City Manager Dorothy David and City Clerk Marilyn Banks in early 2020 regarding minutes from mid 2019 that hadn’t yet been posted.  Klose pointed out that the City Council typically took 2-3 times longer to approve minutes than what is allowed by statute.  Multiple exchanges with City staff did not seem to ameliorate the situation, as the violations eventually grew both in number and extremity.

After more than a year of frustration, Klose sent a request for review to the Illinois Attorney General on April 24, 2021.  The Public Access Counselor’s Office determined that the situation merited an investigation and Deputy Bureau Chief Laura Harter asked the City of Champaign to explain why they were not following the OMA requirements.

Ms. Klose had already sent a request for review to the IAG on September 19, 2020 alleging the same types of violations.  The PAC responded on October 1, 2020 to both Klose and Mayor Deborah Feinen indicating that while there did appear to be OMA violations, the request could not be considered by the PAC because it had not been made within 60 days of the meeting dates for which the Council had failed to approve minutes.  The attempt at getting the IAG to step in failed, but it shows that Mayor Feinen had clear notice (over seven months ago) that the City needed to change its practices to comply with the OMA.  On the contrary, compliance became much worse.

City Attorney Frederick Stavins responded, arguing that the City does post meeting videos and agendas, which he says are more informative than the minutes.  Check CU notes that the OMA gives no such exemption and simply posting meeting videos does not serve the same function as the public body reviewing and affirming its own motions and votes in a written format that is searchable by the public.

Stavins also argued that the COVID-19 pandemic has made approval of minutes more difficult, but he did not provide any meaningful details.  As already noted, the Champaign City Council had frequently failed to generate and approve minutes in 2019 and early 2020, long before the pandemic.  Klose noted that the violations stretch back for years.

Harter has not yet issued a final determination in the matter, but the violations appear both flagrant and substantial.  The City seems to have capitulated, as Champaign City Council will be meeting tonight at 7pm and their agenda shows approval of minutes for twenty six past meetings.  The very late approval of meeting minutes would seem to be mostly symbolic, since it is unlikely any of the Council members could clearly recollect motions and votes from eight months ago, and three of the Council members have since been replaced.

The responsibility of producing meeting minutes is given to the City Clerk, Marilyn Banks.  It is has not yet been made clear if the fault lies with the Clerk or with the Council for failing to approve minutes, but the OMA ultimately holds the City Council accountable. 

Check CU contacted Frederick Stavins’s office for a comment but has not received a response.