The Committee on Oversight, Reforms, and Ethics voted bill HB 5459 out to the House floor today. The measure increases the transparency of public meetings and helps ensure that public bodies aren’t abusing emergency provisions within the 18 hour posting law to purposefully hold last minute, non-emergency meetings that some unscrupulous officials would like to keep out of the public eye.
\nAccording to the Open Meetings Act, government bodies must publicly display announcements of meetings at least 18 hours prior to the meeting start time. Opsommer found that some meetings are posted on office doors in locked buildings just prior to the end of the work day on Friday, unnecessarily limiting the amount of public exposure of the notice. In other cases, so called “emergency meetings” are being held for reasons that have nothing to do with true emergencies, such as tornadoes, flooding, or disease outbreaks.
\n“We have a lot of fancy lawyers who are taking a necessary carve-out in the law and using it so that basically they can call a meeting without public attendance almost anytime they want to,” said Opsommer, R-DeWitt. “That and other schemes like posting a notice inside a locked building over the weekend where no one can see it have to stop”.
\nOpsommer has also heard from many people that a more efficient way to announce non-regularly scheduled public meetings would be to post them on a website as well, so that people don’t have to go to city hall every day to see if any last minute meetings have been announced. Opsommer said that such language was put into the substitute bill that was passed out of committee, and he disagreed that internet posting for non-regularly scheduled meetings put an unnecessary burden on the government.
\n“This bill does not mandate that small townships that do not have an internet presence have to create a website, but does say if such a site exists that they need to electronically post these surprise meetings,” said Opsommer. “Ask me what is more inconvenient: training a clerk how to post something onto their website or how to send an email to their web administrator, or forcing thousands of citizens to get into a car every 24 hours and drive to every public body with taxing powers over them to see what they have taped to their front door? To have the same people who are posting things multiple times a day onto their Facebook and Twitter accounts now try to say that a clerk or township official does not have the ability to post something onto a website seems to stretch the imagination. In those circumstances where there does need to be some training, this seems to me to be a core function of government. If we can train people to collect taxes, we can train people to post on the web”.
\nOpsommer thanked the members for their unanimous vote and asked them to help stop any efforts to weaken the bill on the floor.
\n“We have a court ruling that as it stands today literally allows for a piece of paper to be taped inside a locked office and meet the requirements of the law,” said Opsommer. “That is a problem that I think we can all solve quickly in a very bi-partisan way.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Committee on Oversight, Reforms, and Ethics voted<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}