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During each council session, City Council approves minutes from the previous session. These minutes serve to recap the decisions made throughout the prior council meeting and to create a quickly re-visitable log of the events that occurred. Most often, there are changes needed– misspellings or a few word alterations– and the vote is largely non-eventful. But last nights meeting was quite a bit different.
Council watchdog Jim Mosher and Anti-Fire-Ring activist Barbara Peters spoke against approving the meeting minutes as written, claiming that they do not represent the meeting as it occurred.
The prior Council meeting, Scott Peotter made a motion to move forward with a temporary solution for the fire rings. Nobody disputes this. There were two negative votes (Dixon and Curry) and five positive votes (Peotter, Muldoon, Duffy, Petros, and Mayor Selich).
Here’s where it gets tricky: The meeting minutes say that Peotters motion (and the subsequent votes) were also for 60 fire rings– not just the interim plan of 30 fire rings.
Now, due to the newness of Peotter (it was his first voting session), his motion was long, drawn out, and could rightly be considered confusing to some– like those same activists say they thought that the vote was only for the 30 fire rings and the temporary plan. However, of the 5 that voted for the motion, 4 stated that it was perfectly clear that the motion was also for a 60-ring, permanent plan. Incidentally, 4 votes are all that is needed to pass a motion.
This is where voting on meeting minutes come in. If the majority of council says “Yes, this is the correct history of events, and this is what we voted on.”, then the meeting minutes pass. If the majority of the council says “These meeting minutes are inaccurate and need to be changed”, then the needed changes occur.
As for this particular vote, Four of the Five council members who voted for the motion say that the intent was clearly to establish a 60-ring-plan. This is also what the city staff recorded in the meeting minutes. It should be noted that after each session, councilmembers have the option to reconsider any vote that they had previously voted “yes” on. This option was not exercised by any of the five people who voted yes on the motion.
The question here really boils down to this:
Are meeting minutes made to reflect a verbatim account of the previous council session, or simply a summary of what occurred? One could reasonably argue that a verbatim account already exists in the form of archived video, and that the purpose of minutes is to clearly and concisely recap what is often an inherently messy and confusing meeting.
So, what do you think? If the vote was unclear to only one of the people who voted for the motion (and the motion still has more than enough votes to carry even without that person), should the city reconsider the motion altogether? Should the minutes be changed to be a literal transcription of the events like the video already does, or should they remain merely for purposes of recapping the situation?
For your consideration before your conclusion: Roberts Rules of Order— the de facto reference for all things Minute-Related– states that Minutes should simply state what was done at the meeting, not what was said at the meeting.
