Is the Hamilton County Commission following the Sunshine Law?
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF)- In addition to their regular meetings, the Hamilton County Commission hold a series of committee meetings.
However, there are some questions rising about how those committees are being operated.
The Tennessee Sunshine Law requires all governmental bodies to conduct business in the view of the public.
At 9:30 each Wednesday morning, the Hamilton County Commission does this with their regular meetings.
However, their various committee meetings, of which the Commission’s website lists nine different sub-committees, have some mysteries around them.
One of the issues that came up during Wednesday’s education committee inside of the Hamilton County Courthouse, was whether or not school board members who attended the meeting were allowed to openly participate in the discussion.
This resulted in a back and forth between Commissioners Joe Graham and Steve Highlander, as Highlander chaired the education committee.
Commissioner Graham in defense of the school board members said, “This is a public meeting and it has been announced and it has been advertised, and there’s even media here.”
Commissioner Highlander responded, “It has been announced through our means, but the School Board Policy has a different policy that they follow then we do, and this is not going through them. This is set up to be between the Commissioners and the staff, and they have, if like the Chairman had a question he could ask, that’s fine. But if they begin a dialogue, they could get in trouble, and I’m trying to prevent that, to keep us totally legal.”
Commissioner Highlander said that he had set up the meeting as a quote, “exploratory session”.
Deborah Fisher, the executive director of the advocacy group Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, says that should not change who can be in a discussion.
Fisher said, “Whether it is just an information meeting or a public meeting, there’s nothing that I know about in law that requires you to prevent people from speaking.”
There are further questions that our look into the Commission has raised.
One of these is whether or not the Commission’s legal notices properly tell when committee meetings are supposed to be.
You can see a list of legal notices they have published here.
Notice that it mentions that any committee meetings may start an hour before the regular meeting or occur afterwards.
However, it doesn’t list specific committees that will be held on a given date.
Compare this to an example from the Chattanooga City Council, who gave this notice recently for their Parks and Public Works Committee schedule.
Highlander told us that they meet their requirement by publishing their notices in a newspaper and through their closing announcements, as he did on Wednesday.
However, Fisher doesn’t think this is enough for the public.
Fisher said, “From the perspective of a citizen, a citizen would have no idea which committee was meeting, nor really which time that they’re meeting, before or after the regular session. Not only they wouldn’t even know the topic of the committee meeting…It assumes that people are wanting to sit through the hours and hours of a regular meeting, and every other meeting, just to sit there for the one piece of information about when a committee is meeting. I don’t think this is a hard concept, you need a schedule of when committees are meeting, it’s pretty basic one on one government… I think that maybe it’s time to say, “Hey we have the technology, we have the website, we can make it easier for our citizens to know when our committee meetings are.”
Additionally, there are no minutes listed for these committee sessions, just for regular sessions, something that also raises Fisher’s eyebrows.
She said, “(A) Committee is a meeting under the Open Meetings Act, and minutes should be taken and there should be a recording of the people present.”
It is worth noting that other bodies such as the Chattanooga City Council and Hamilton County School Board do post the times of specific committees on their websites.
