I happened to be scrolling through some of my earliest blog entries this evening when I came upon this item from April 2009.
It discusses the Amarillo municipal government’s work sessions, those public meetings that occur prior to the start of the “regular” meetings.
I think it’s worth mentioning once againĀ that the City Council — which used to be called a City Commission — does a good job of ensuring that it doesn’t violate the Texas Open Meetings Act.
The state law spells out in careful language those issues that elected bodies can discuss outside of public earshot: personnel matters, pending litigation, sale or purchase of real estate.
That’s it, man.
The City Council has revamped its regular meeting procedure in recent months. It now meets in the early evenings every Tuesday, enabling working residents to attend after they get off their jobs during the day.
There have been calls to get rid of the work sessions, or at least to move them into the council chambers, where there’s plenty of seating to enable large crowds to attend. I even joined that call a year ago in an earlier blog post. However, it’s not because I feared the council was violating open meetings laws.
Even in the old days, when the council met in that tiny meeting room away from the regular meeting chambers, the elected body took pains to avoid breaking state law.
Yes, the mayor would declare an executive session was about to occur, sending media representatives and other members of the public scurrying from the room. The only serious loophole in the state law had been the lack of recordings of those secret meetings to ensure that the body wasn’t talking about things it should be discussing.
Still, the complainers keep carping on what they allege is some sort of secret cabal doing business illegally. They found their voice during the campaign in 2015 for the multipurpose event venue, suggesting that the MPEV was crafted and cobbled together in secret … illegally!
It turned out to be a red herring and voters saw through it by approving the MPEV.
It reminds of the many conspiracy theories throughout history that simply never die.