The Attorney General has finally issued a determination on a number of complaints about the Urbana, Illinois City Council which stretch back nearly three years. According to a determination letter issued today by Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Silver, both the Urbana City Council and the Cunningham Township Board (comprised of the same elected officials) have repeatedly failed to properly approve meeting minutes and make them available to the public.
From 2021 to 2023 Check CU Founder and writer Christopher Hansen sent four complaints to the Public Access Counselor (PAC) at the AG’s office alleging that the City Council was not approving meeting minutes in a timely fashion and was also failing to make those minutes available to the public, as required by the Open Meetings Act (OMA).
The OMA creates such a requirement for all public bodies in Illinois:
“A public body shall approve the minutes of its open meeting within 30 days after that meeting or at the public body’s second subsequent regular meeting, whichever is later. * * * [A] public body that has a website that the full-time staff of the public body maintains shall post the minutes of a regular meeting of its governing body open to the public on the public body’s website within 10 days after the approval of the minutes by the public body.”
Despite the multiple complaints, the Urbana Council often took months to approve meeting minutes, and they also failed to post them to the City website.
City Attorney David Wesner tried to argue that some of the meeting minutes were not approved late, since the City Council and the City Council Committee of the Whole were two distinct public bodies, and therefore the OMA afforded them additional time. However, the PAC made clear in a 2017 opinion against the Township of Schaumburg that a Committee of the Whole is not a different public body for purposes of the OMA, and such a tactic was again denied by the PAC in February of 2020 when a binding opinion was issued against Sauk Village.
Wesner also argued that the City of Urbana did not have “a website that the full-time staff of the public body maintains”, an argument which, on its face, makes little sense. However, Wesner reasoned that because Urbana did not have any one particular employee whose singular full-time task was maintaining the City website, Urbana was exempt. AAG Silver dismantled Wesner’s arguments:
“Although the Clerk’s office may not always have full-time staff, it is undisputed that other City departments have full-time staff whose job responsibilities include maintaining various aspects of the City website. Section 2.06(b) cannot be reasonably construed to permit a public body with a website maintained by full-time staff to avoid posting meeting minutes on its website by delegating to a part-time employee or elected official the task of updating the portion of the website that contains minutes. Because the Council has a website that full-time staff maintains as a part of its duties, this office concludes that the Council is subject to the section 2.06(b) website posting requirements and violated that section by failing to timely post the minutes of its various regular meetings.”
The PAC therefore determined that the Urbana City Council and the Cunningham Township Board violated the Open Meetings Act by failing to approve minutes in a timely manner, and that the City Council further violated the OMA by failing to post meeting minutes to the City website.
The entire 8 page determination letter, issued on April 12th, 2024, can be viewed below or by clicking here.
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