Agenda - 02-19-2019 8-a - Minutes

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7 1 either"legislative, policy-making, quasi-judicial, administrative, or advisory functions." These 2 meetings must be open to the public unless the subject matter qualifies for an exception to the 3 open meetings law. 4 5 The second example is of a meeting that is absolutely not a meeting of a public body. In this 6 example the Planning Director, County Manager, Health Director, and several other staff 7 members meet to discuss an issue on an upcoming Board of County Commissioners' regular 8 meeting agenda. The product of the meeting is an advisory memo to the Board of County 9 Commissioners in which the staff members recommend specific action. This meeting does not 10 involve elected or appointed officials and is not a regularly scheduled meeting, and further 11 NCGS 143-318.10(c) specifically excludes staff only meetings from the definition of what 12 constitutes public body. 13 14 For the final example I will use a hybrid meeting that is not an official meeting of a public body. 15 In this example several department directors and multiple staff of several local governments 16 attend a meeting to discuss details of an intergovernmental agreement. In addition to the staff, 17 several elected officials from various local governments also attend the meeting, although no 18 quorum of any one elected body is present. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss changes 19 to the intergovernmental agreement. Assuming this is an ad hoc group that met to discuss the 20 changes and will then present the results of the discussion to the various governmental boards 21 for action this would not be an official meeting required to be opened to the public. Some of the 22 reasons include; the attendees were not appointed by any governmental entity to attend and 23 the group itself was not created by any governmental entity. If the attendees were appointed by 24 the various governmental entities to attend then it could rise to the level of a public body and 25 the meeting would then rise to the level of an official meeting but those are not the facts of this 26 example. Even though this was not an official meeting of a public body the public could be 27 invited, but this is not required and whether or not to do so would be up to the host entity. 28 29 This final example is analogous to the recent meeting at GoTriangle that consisted primarily of 30 staff but also involved some elected officials. That meeting, similar to others in the past, did not 31 involve a quorum of any governmental entity and did not result in any official action taking place 32 at the meeting. Also, to the best of my knowledge, the attendees were not appointed to 33 participate by any of the involved governmental entities. This meeting would not constitute a 34 meeting of a public body. Since it was not an official meeting of a public body it was not 35 required to be open to the public and the decision of whether to do so rests entirely with the 36 host of the meeting. Certainly some members of the public could want access to the meeting 37 to see the proverbial sausage being made, however, the open meetings law does not require 38 that access and it was entirely lawful to exclude the public from the meeting if the host entity 39 elected to do so. 40 41 Chair Rich read the following: 42 43 Response: I will note this response addresses only Orange County hosted meetings. 44 Meetings hosted by other governmental organizations are the responsibility of those 45 organizations. 46 47 In formulating this response I consulted with the County Attorney to determine what is required 48 by law to be open to the public. The County Attorney's response was that most meetings of 49 elected officials are required by law to be open to the public, meetings comprised entirely of 50 staff are not required to be open to the public, and meetings of informal groups comprised of