A city with many boards and commissions, like the City of Ann Arbor, hosts a lot of meetings. With lots of meetings comes lots of meeting minutes, and the obligation under the Michigan Open Meetings Act to prepare those minutes promptly.

For this week's column, I looked for meeting minutes for four of the city's appeal boards. What I found was that some of those meeting minutes were missing, a problem remedied in part by applying the remedies of the Michigan Freedom of Information Act and the Michigan Open Meetings Act.

Looking for minutes

My first step was to look for minutes online.

The City of Ann Arbor keeps minutes online in two separate places. Some of them are kept in the Legistar system, which holds the minutes for the City Council and some of the larger commissions and boards. Other minutes are kept on the City's web site, scattered here and there on the pages managed by the unit responsible for the meeting.

Legistar is good for what it is. When everything is working just so, you can not only see the official minutes for any agenda item, but also the video for that portion of the agenda, so that any nuances not captured in the text can be replayed. It has some cumbersome aspects as well, since there is no obvious way to download a complete dump of all of the attachments to all of the agenda items for a meeting. Sometimes you want a deep dive into just the two minutes of a decision; other times, you really do want 600+ pages of PDF to page through one page at a time with one finger on the space bar and an adult beverage in the other hand.

Of the four boards that I was looking at, none of them had complete minutes in Legistar. Instead, they publish minutes as PDF documents on the city web site.

When you don't find all of the minutes

I looked at four appeals boards (Sign, Zoning, Building, and Housing) to read through what they were doing and to see if their published minutes were up to date. All told, I found 24 meetings in 2009 and 2010 where minutes had not been published, out of a total of 88 meetings that could have been held. (Not every board meets every month.)

There are three possible reasons that minutes would not be published. One is that the meeting never took place, either because there was no need to call it, or because the assembled members did not form a quorum. A second is that the meeting was held, and minutes were prepared, but those minutes had not yet gone online. And a third is that the meeting was held but no minutes were prepared.

I wrote down what was missing, and what I was looking for, in the form of a FOIA request and sent it off to the City Clerk's Office for handling.

Waiting for minutes

As an aside, this is not the first time I've send in a FOIA request for meeting minutes. It took five weeks to get a full set of minutes from an Ann Arbor Historic District Commission meeting, a process which I noted in March. (My minutes request and rejection, appeal of the rejection, and the successful appeal.) Five weeks is a long time to wait, though it was within all statutory time limits (three weeks for the response, plus two weeks for the response to the appeal).

This time, mercifully, I got a faster response, within a week. Only one set of meeting minutes was unavailable, and I am told that I will get an answer by Dec. 10; all of the rest were published, or it was noted that no meeting occurred.

Sign Board of Appeals

The Sign Board was the only board to ask for an extension under the Michigan FOIA law for the request for minutes, for one of its meetings, held in September 2009.

There is a long history of disputes over signs in Ann Arbor; my piece from October details some of this in discussing the Ann Arbor Historical Signs collection, a set of photographs by the city sign inspector from the days when the city sign ordinance was so severe that it made almost every sign in town illegal.

The September meeting is an interesting one. In previous meetings, members of the board discussed how many signs in town are non-conforming, and how frustrated they are that business owners who follow the ordinance are penalized for their adherence to the letter of the law when scofflaws go unnoticed. The available minutes for the January meeting note that the chairman, Steve Schweer, had stepped down, presumably at the meeting with the missing minutes.

No meetings of the Sign Board of Appeals have been held since January.

Some relevant parts of the law, as I understand it

The Michigan Open Meetings Act is clear that draft minutes are to be available to the public within eight days, and does not contemplate extensions. If a suit is brought in court, the court can issue a "writ of mandamus" compelling the agency to produce minutes.

I looked to see if this portion of the law had any teeth, in the sense of any case that I could find that would bolster anyone's argument that minute keeping was such a grave matter that a court would hinge a decision on the presence or absence of minutes of an open meeting. Alas, nothing was very encouraging. (I am not a lawyer, and I'm relying on Google Scholar to look up cases, so it's entirely possible that I missed something.)

In Arnold Transit Co. v. City of Mackinac Island, 297 NW 2d 904 - Mich: Court of Appeals 1980, the court found that the absence of official minutes was not a reason for invalidating an ordinance passed at a meeting which was properly noticed and publicized and at which a newspaper reporter was in attendance . The court cites this decision in Manning v. City of East Tawas 593 NW 2d 649 - Mich: Court of Appeals 1999: "Furthermore, deficiencies in the keeping of minutes of meetings are, in any event, not grounds for invalidating the actions taken."

Note that there is a whole separate set of disputes about closed meetings, where boards meet in secret to make decisions, in which the Open Meetings Act has been applied to ensure openness of government.

What to do next

Keeping minutes and records of decisions of a deliberative body is fundamental to the understanding of how government works. Alas, it's also time-consuming and thus expensive. When time consuming tasks pile up, some of them don't get done.

On some other planet, there is a town where every public meeting is attended by a room full of citizens, video and audio taped from multiple angles, and where a bench full of eager reporters hinges on every word spoken so that they can speed those reports back to the newsroom for instant analysis and commentary. Alas, the Sign Board of Appeals is unlikely to get this treatment in this town, nor are the dozens of other boards and committees that deal with issues that are important to the small corner of town that they regulate but not the entire population.

It helps to have board meetings recorded and televised and available for review online. The city's Public Access Channel 16 telecasts some, but not all of the board meetings, and those recordings are available online for review. A recent Cable Commission meeting disclosed that the vendor for the city's cable on demand offerings, Leightronix, was looking to provide live streaming over the Internet of minutes in a future software release. This was demonstrated to the New York City council in November, according to a press release.

There's no substitute for the official written record of events, no matter what other technology comes to bear. Thus I will continue to ask for meeting minutes, and to appeal any decision that results in delays to the production of minutes, because these are the sorts of small things that turn out to be important in the long run.

Edward Vielmetti writes the FOIA Friday column for AnnArbor.com.