Eyerolling not to be included in definition of disorderly conduct

Updated from: Mother always said not to roll your eyes

A few weeks ago, Elmhurst IL city officials ejected a citizen from a public meeting for rolling her eyes, which the city council members deemed a disturbance to the meeting. After consulting with the city attorney, the council this week was upset to find out that eye rolling could in no way be considered a disturbance to a public meeting. After the original incident, the council moved to adopt a concrete definition of public disturbance, commissioning their attorney to develop the definition. The council later stated that they never intended to include eye-rolling in the definition. Council member Mark Mulliner told the Elmhurst Press, “I want to make sure the public understands this was not in any way intended to expel people for eye-rolling. It got out there and it was a snowball and comedians loved it.” Apparently the original ejection for eye rolling was just a confusion on the part of the press as well, and had no basis in reality nor gave any cause for worry?

Either way, the newly proposed definition is below:

“The presiding officer shall have the power to specifically prohibit any individual from engaging in the following behavior during any meeting of the council or any of its committees:
1. Conduct in violation of any city ordinance, state or federal law, or any
rule or regulation implementing state or federal law;
2. Interruption of speakers; name calling; boisterous remarks;
3. Offensive use of abusive, obscene, profane, slanderous or threatening
language or gestures;
4. Acting or behaving in such an unreasonable manner so as to alarm or
disturb another and to provoke a breach of the peace; and
5. Any other act designed to intimidate, threaten or harm persons, or
damage or destroy property.

The presiding officer has the power to require individuals who have engaged in the above-listed prohibited behavior to leave the meeting, or to order the removal of such an offender. The offender has no right to appeal from such an order of the presiding officer; however, such an order may be appealed by a member of the council, or a committee member, as applicable, present at the meeting. Any ruling by the presiding officer may be overruled by a majority of the members present at such council or committee meeting.”

To read more please see, City attorney says eye-rolling not grounds for meeting ejection

~Joshua Meyer
Editor of WikiFOIA
joshualmeyer@wikifoia.org

Stonewalling via script

I came across one of the most interesting video recordings of an outrageous stonewalling I have encountered in my work on public records and wanted to share it with everyone. In the video, whose link appeared in a news story by the Mercury News of San Jose CA, three citizens attempt to gain access to public records, namely building permits in digital form. The only response the city manager makes is to repeatedly read from a script stating that city policy would not allow the citizens access to the computers and that it was not the city’s policy to train employees on antiquated software. This of course begs the question why there records are being stored in an inaccessible location.

However, that was not the end of it. As the citizens began citing the open records act to the official, all he could do was stand there silently and ignore their comments. In addition, when confronted with the question of whether or not a city official, apparently known to be able to access the records by the citizens, could in fact access the records the city official instead of lying, opted to refuse to respond to their question, instead asking them if he could help with anything else. We wish the trio of citizens the best of luck in their lawsuit and thank them for their good work!

To see the full 8 minute video, Click Here!

~Joshua Meyer
Editor of WikiFOIA
joshualmeyer@wikifoia.org

Facebook and the Open Records Act:Guidelines for a Useful Transparent Governmental Account

This past week another municipality, Redondo Beach CA, disabled their facebook account due to fears of legal troubles resulting from open meetings and open records violation. While the city still uses twitter and youtube, the loss of facebook was criticized by the mayor of the town as “a big mistake”. And while transparency and preventing records violations are of the utmost importance, I can’t help but agree with the mayor.

The us of new social media like facebook and twitter by cities and municipalities presents a unique method for interacting with and notifying their constituencies. The problem that arises with a website like facebook is the need to maintain the information to comply with open records policies and the worry that the comment features will result in either open meetings violations or inappropriate comments that are protected by free speech. However, this problem can be circumvented with a few clear steps which would allow municipalities to embrace a method of communication that would reach a large portion of their citizens.

#1)Understand the goal

Too many municipalities approach Facebook with the goal of creating a method for interactive or dynamic communication between themselves and their citizens. They see the status updates and wall posts as a new democratic forum. While there is certainly room for the advancement of digital democratic forums, Facebook’s international reach and inability to back up content renders it a less ideal method for achieving this goal. For municipalities, Facebook should be used to post concrete information, including information related to municipal contact information, meeting times, links to agendas and status updates concerning upcoming meetings. While, most of the information I would recommend putting on the site can be found on numerous municipality websites, the benefit of using Facebook is that it would reach citizens with real time updates on issues. Municipalities should keep this goal in mind when establishing privacy settings. They should be open to Facebook “friending” anyone while at the same time keeping their wall and contact information transparent and open for viewing to everyone it insure ease of access for those interested.

#2)Restrict comments

While every municipality and public body should be open to critique and comment, Facebook may not be the best method for doing so. The potential to add comments presents serious problems for open meetings violation when repeated comments are made by city council members. In addition, hostile comments which would be protected by free political speech are not well suited for a Facebook environment. Municipalities should disable comments and disallow anyone from posting on their walls to prevent these issues. This can be done by simply entering the accounts privacy settings and making the appropriate changes.

#3)Messages and a dedicated email

Not to disable all means of Facebook communication, municipalities should still employ the message features on Facebook to allow citizens easy access to comment on the political happenings of the town or city. However, municipality directors should have the foresight to use a dedicated email address to send and receive(more receive) only Facebook comments and information. In addition, this email address should be fully transparent and comply fully with the states open records laws.

#4)Keep it simple:don’t comment and avoid messaging

Unfortunately for municipalities, for Facebook to be feasible within transparency laws, communication needs to be extremely restricted. Due to open records restrictions, municipalities need to avoid commenting on other peoples status’s and avoid writing on their walls. Comments should be restricted to their own wall posts and nothing more. In addition, municipalities should be cautious about sending messages with the message feature for the same reason. Instead, municipalities could use their dedicated facebook email accounts to reply to messages, thus insuring the preservation of emails and transparency. If a municipality decided to use the message feature, either to reply to messages sent or to send broad messages to large citizen groups then the municipality should be cautious and always save a back up of the message off facebook, including the list of individuals sent to. Finally, and it goes without saying, don’t install and use any applications. That is just asking for trouble!

#5)Always backup

By restricting comments to only wall posts and preventing other citizens from commenting or posting on the municipalities wall, public bodies insure that a simple record can be maintained to include all wall posts for the purposes of compliance with public records laws. At the end of each day, assign a public employee the task of taking five minutes and copying the wall posts into the appropriate shared document and maintaining those wall posts for future records requests. This, combined with the dedicated email address, will assure compliance with the open records act, and prevent open meetings abuses and inappropriate comments from surfacing on a city website.

While this structure is less than ideal, and doesn’t provide the same benefits as the interactive website may offer the average citizen, it is none-the-less useful and helpful tool for both the public body and citizens. Posting contact information and meetings calendars can be an extremely useful use of the bio portion of the facebook page. In addition, while this information may already be made available on the website, it may reach a different group of constituents on facebook. In addition the use of status updates to post meeting announcements, links to agendas and minutes as well as general local news would allow municipalities and governing bodies the opportunity to send a constant stream of important governmental information to their citizens. While it can’t be treated like a personal account, so long as governing bodies follow the five guidelines outlined above, problems with transparency laws and inappropriate comments should be eliminated and citizens and the government alike may enjoy the benefits of more direct contact and notification about important local events and governmental decisions.

~Joshua Meyer
Editor of WikiFOIA
www.wikifoia.org