Recess meeting draws concern

The Spokane City Council may have broken the state’s open meeting law on Monday night while it was trying to figure out how to assure voters that the city would keep track of the money from a bond issue voters are being asked to approve for parks and pools, a state attorney said Tuesday.

As the council seemed about to deadlock over what kind of committee it should set up, Council President Joe Shogan called a recess. But rather than leave the dais, council members gathered in groups and continued to talk, presumably about the issue.

At one point four gathered and conversed; at another point, five.

Discussions like that could violate state law, said Assistant Attorney General Timothy Ford, who received a complaint Tuesday about the action from Donna McKereghan, a local government watchdog who was at the meeting.

McKereghan was at the meeting and raised a question about the validity of the council’s impromptu, on-camera but off-microphone discussions when the recess was over.

Shogan asked the council’s attorney, Mike Piccolo, whether they could proceed.

“Do we need to defer so there’s no taint?” Shogan said, who added he took responsibility for any problems from the recess. “None of us could decide what the heck we were doing.”

Piccolo told the council it was free to vote on agenda items that concerned what type of committee it wanted to set up. He said he never saw the council members gather in groups larger than three – four or more constitutes a quorum – and they didn’t vote during the recess, so they didn’t take any action.

Ford disagreed. In an e-mail response to McKereghan’s inquiry, he said an informal discussion at the dais during a recess could constitute an illegal meeting, where official business is being discussed by a quorum.

“The law defines ‘action’ very broadly to include discussion or deliberations,” he wrote. “While there may not be any final actions (like votes) taken in such discussions, governing bodies should take care that the public is not excluded from these types of ‘meetings’ The (law) requires that all meetings, with limited and explicit exceptions for executive sessions, are open to the public.”

McKereghan said she hasn’t decided whether to take the council to court over the possible violation. If the council did violate the law, the city could be fined, and the validity of the advisory committee the council eventually approved could be called into question, she said.

City Attorney Jim Craven said Tuesday he thought it would be hard to characterize the meeting as “secret” since it occurred in front of the council chamber and cable television audience.

Because “no one thought to ask” what the council was talking about, he said, there’s nothing on the record that indicates they were talking about the items on the agenda.

He doesn’t think there are any cases that address the open meetings law and this particular situation.

“I don’t think it would void any action they would take,” Craven said. “If there is a violation, it’s hypertechnical and inconsequential, under the circumstances.”