All These Secret Public Meetings
Talent City Council's latest transparency fail is a serious problem.
There was a long Council meeting on Wednesday night, March 5th, where they discussed the Little League fields, City Manager recruitment, Committee liaisons, and other stuff that many of us think are important and that we try to pay attention to. Unfortunately if you weren’t there for that meeting you’re not likely to be able to find out what was decided about anything any time soon. You probably didn’t even know the meeting was happening in the first place.
That would be because something is (not) happening at City Hall that’s preventing the public from being even minimally informed about meetings and the decisions and discussions occurring in them.
Here is an incomplete list of the Open Meetings Law near-violations that we have observed since we started paying attention to this in January:
The Council, Study Sessions, and Subcommittee meetings held the week of March 3rd were not adequately noticed, meaning there were no announcements made via email or Facebook about the upcoming meetings. It appears that the only way to have known about the meetings from an official source was to pay close attention to the Calendar on their website, because they were posted there with very little advance notice. The City’s Facebook page as a source of meeting information appears to have been abandoned since early February.
There have been no meeting minutes available to view for any Regular Council Meeting since August 7, 2024. Seven month’s worth of minutes! A few drafts were included as part of an agenda packet in January, but despite those presumably being approved with the Consent Calendar, they still have not been uploaded to the City’s meeting documentation web page. The Mayor and other City representatives have stated that because they post the video recordings of meetings on their YouTube channel, they are not required to post the minutes. So they just don’t.
Without meeting minutes, we have no choice but to watch the video recording of the meetings on YouTube to find the result of a vote or content of a discussion. A lot of these meetings are several hours long and there are no timestamps or chapters embedded in the video or in the description text to make it possible to find something specific without watching the entire thing.
To make it worse, many of the video recordings have long sections without legible audio. So even if you are industrious and patient enough to locate the specific topic you’re looking for, you may not be able to hear what they’re saying anyway. And when that happens, without any minutes available to cross reference, there’s literally no way to find out what was said or decided during that inaudible time.
If we’re gonna have to rely on videos to take the place of minutes, then they need to actually upload the videos! As of today March 8th, there are no video or audio recordings of any meeting since January accessible to the public. The recordings had been getting uploaded to YouTube within a few days after the meeting in lieu of minutes, but that hasn’t been happening. That’s 23 consecutive public meetings (and counting) held in which the public has zero access to the decisions that have been made by our City officials.
Here is the relevant (ORS 192.650) section regarding meeting recordings and minutes:
The governing body of a public body shall provide for the sound, video or digital recording or the taking of written minutes of all its meetings. Neither a full transcript nor a full recording of the meeting is required, except as otherwise provided by law, but the written minutes or recording must give a true reflection of the matters discussed at the meeting and the views of the participants. All minutes or recordings shall be available to the public within a reasonable time after the meeting.
“Reasonable time after the meeting” is obviously open to some interpretation, but standard practice is to make draft minutes available within a few days to 2 or 3 weeks after a meeting, with final approval typically occurring at the next regular meeting. “The recording of the meeting should be available within a few days of the meeting, if not sooner.”1
For a Council that prides itself on how open and transparent it is, it’s weird that they aren’t more diligent about ensuring their meeting documentation is actually accessible to the public, right?
Of course Council relies on City staff to do the actual posting of meeting minutes, recordings, and notices, but we don’t think the situation we have here is a matter of someone on staff not doing their job. Without having spoken to any current City employees, based on our own professional experiences with poorly led, high-stress workplaces and our knowledge of how City staff has been treated in the past, it’s hard to imagine that the City Recorder is over there taking 3-hour lunches every day and playing video games on his computer instead of posting minutes. Staff in positions subordinate to the City Manager - who answers only to Council - are typically instructed on how to prioritize competing responsibilities and heavy workloads. Administrative duties in an office like this can be overwhelming on a normal day, much more so when emergencies and resignations and urgent deadlines come up, and even more so when you have situations like when the City Recorder is also serving as the Community Outreach department and the IT staff. For example!
From our perspective, significant neglect of transparency obligations like what we are seeing in Talent right now is a management and leadership problem, not an admin personnel issue. It’s a predictable product of severe under-staffing and over-burdening, and it also signals deeper issues within leadership around public accountability. (The only people who can hold Council accountable are the public, but we can’t really do that when we don’t even know what they’re saying in their meetings, can we?) It also raises a lot of questions about what exactly is being consistently prioritized above informing the public, and why these important obligations to us are routinely getting pushed off for such a prolonged period of time.
It makes sense when someone’s sick or on vacation for some of the less urgent stuff to get pushed to the side for a bit. And given the recent transition to a new City Manager, we should certainly expect (and forgive) administrative delay. We get all that. But this isn’t about stalled documents over a couple of weeks, we’re talking about 65% of all public meetings held over the last 4 months and 100% of Regular Council meetings over the last 2 months having produced NO records that are available to the public. Residents not in attendance at every meeting have no idea what their City Council has accomplished or decided on for almost 2 months now. That’s not ok!
It is the Council’s responsibility to ensure that the public is informed about their decision-making, and they need to do this by consistently prioritizing transparency and enforcing its compliance, even when it’s a challenge to do so. This level of disregard for information accessibility is a failure of responsibility on the part of our Council and should be corrected now, before it is seen as intentionally obstructive behavior and/or becomes a punishable violation of law.
Transparency in local government is not defined as doing the bare minimum to avoid breaking the law. True transparency is City Council being accountable, honest and open about what is happening in government and making genuine efforts to build a culture of trust and respectful engagement with its constituents. That’s the transparency that we’re always looking for more of from Talent City Council, and it’s what we’re getting much less of than we deserve right now.
-Talent Council Watch
Fellow Talentonians, if you’re as concerned about this problem as we are, please consider letting the Council and your neighbors know about it. You can email any of the Councilors directly or all at once.
Talent City Council: talentcc@cityoftalent.org
Councilor Ana Byers: Councilor2@cityoftalent.org
Councilor Colette Paré-Miller: Councilor1@cityoftalent.org
Councilor Daniel Collay: Councilor6@cityoftalent.org
Councilor David Pastizzo: Councilor3@cityoftalent.org
Councilor Eleanor Ponomareff: Councilor5@cityoftalent.org
Councilor Rosario Medina: Councilor4@cityoftalent.org
You can also post a link to this TCW Report in a Talent Facebook group or on NextDoor to spread the word and get people discussing this issue.
If you believe there has been a violation of Open Meetings law you can also reach out to the Oregon Government Ethics Commission (OGEC) to ask questions or file an official complaint.
Or just send us an email with your stories, feedback, advice, or support: talentcouncilwatch@gmail.com
From Dept of Justice Public Records and Meetings Manual (PDF): “We assume that a governing body generally should be able to make a sound, video, or digital recording of a meeting available to the public within a few days following the meeting. However, the preparation of written minutes may take longer in the usual course of business: small bodies may not have the staff to prepare the minutes in just a few days, and larger bodies that do have substantial staff typically meet more often or for longer amounts of time. Three weeks arguably is within the “reasonable time” allowed by the statute, but the Oregon Government Ethics Commission or a reviewing court may reach a different conclusion.”