Paul was the appropriate remedy for these transgressions: namely, whether they warranted invocation of the three-strikes-and-you’re-out provision of the law, which removes a serial Open Meeting offender from office and bars return to that same position for a time period equivalent to the present term of office. The critical issue before the judges in St. While the monetary fines were fine, they wanted the offenders subject to the forfeiture-of-office provision. The victorious but dissatisfied Victoria victors took the case to the state Supreme Court. The potent, but rarely utilized three-strikes-and-you’re-out clause had been applied in one notable occasion in 1994 to remove the Mayor of Hibbing and two other officials in that Iron Range community who had committed only four transgressions of the law, which has been amended several times since then with nary an official believed to have forfeited public office due to statutory transgressions. But those tribunals at the trial and appellate levels refused to grant the relief most sought after by the challengers: invoking the provision of the law that requires removal from office of a three-time offender. The litigation concerned a group of five combined lawsuits by citizen activists in the west metropolitan community of Victoria in Carver County challenging dozens of closed, “executive” sessions of the five-member City Council going back several years while considering about $7 million construction projects, including a new city hall and public works building, along with lack of public notice of the meetings and failure to properly record them.īoth a Carver County District Court judge presiding over the consolidated cases and a unanimous three-judge panel of the state intermediate appellate found a remarkable 38 violations of the law by the elected officials and imposed fines totaling $7,300 against the four Council members who were sued, including two still on the body, along with one of the leaders of the litigation, who unseated the incumbent mayor, one of the defendants in the litigation. Fines and forfeituresīut the state Supreme Court blew a whopping hole in the law last month in a case entitled Funk v. There are, to be sure, a number exceptions to the requirement of openness, but they are confined to explicit classifications of undertakings where secrecy is reasonably necessary to transact public business, such as personnel review disciplinary matters, strategies for labor negotiations, considerations of real estate acquisitions, internal security measures, and legal advice from counsel on pending or imminent litigation matters, among others. The Open Meeting measure revolves around the principle that meetings of public bodies, supported by taxpayer funds, are presumed to be open to the public. The Open Meeting statute, along with its documentary counterpart, the Government Data Practices Act, enacted 17 years later, constitute the stellar aspects of the state’s “Sunshine” laws aimed at promoting accountability of public officials, the decisions they make, and actions they take. The measure, which has been on the books in one form or another for 61 years, requires most meetings of local and county governmental bodies in Minnesota to be open to the public, as well as other features that promote access by the citizenry, such as advance notice of sessions of public bodies and recordation of them. Their dismay stems from a recent ruling of the Minnesota Supreme Court that makes the state Open Meeting Law more opaque and harder to enforce. Advocates of transparency in government in Minnesota are in a bit of a funk these days.
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