Minutes Posted on Minerva Park Website

As described in the May issue of The Villager, "the official minutes of the Council, as prepared and certified by the Clerk-Treasurer" are available for viewing on the village website.

Perhaps this is an effort for less public records requests? Or maybe an effort to provide a more open account of what goes on in the Community Building?   Either way, the issue still stands that the minutes, as prepared and certified by the Clerk-Treasurer, are less than "full and accurate. The following is as appears in the Ohio Sunshine Laws Manual in regards to minutes:

C. Minutes
1. Content of Minutes
A public body must keep full and accurate 

minutes of its meetings. 

Those minutes are not required to be a verbatim transcript 

of the proceedings, but must include enough facts and 

information to permit the public to understand and 

appreciate the rationale behind the public body’s decisions.
Because executive sessions are not open to the public, 

the meeting minutes need to reflect only the general 

subject matter of the executive session via the motion 

to convene the session for a permissible purpose or purposes.
2. Making Minutes Available
A public body must promptly prepare, file, and make 

available its minutes for public inspection.

The final version of the official minutes approved by members 

of the public body is a public record.

Note that a draft version of the meeting minutes that is being 

circulated for approval is also a public record.
3. Medium on Which Minutes are Kept
The medium on which the official meeting minutes are kept 

is not addressed in either the Ohio Open Meetings Act or 

the Ohio Public Records Act, and may thus be 

determined by the public body itself.
Some public bodies document that choice by 

adopting a formal rule or by passing a resolution or 

motion at a meeting that is reflected in the minutes. 

Many public bodies make a contemporaneous audio recording of the 

meeting to use as back-up in preparing written official minutes. 

The Ohio Attorney General has opined that such 

a recording constitutes a public record that must be made
available for inspection upon request.

Having attended these meetings, I can personally say that the minutes published do not reflect the meeting in a full and accurate way. The minutes could possibly still be said to "permit the public to understand and appreciate the rationale behind the public body's decisions" in that the minutes include support of the public body's decisions; the issue is what they exclude. The reasoning against the public body's decisions. The discrepancies. The details in citizen comments. And when it comes down to it, the honest, unbiased representation of the meeting, all of these things are missing from the minutes as certified by the Clerk-Treasurer.

Repeatedly, there have been discrepancies about the content of the minutes which are brought up before the motion to approve. These don't usually appear in the "full and accurate" minutes. Also missing are the discussions as to why some members vote differently than others. Now, this isn't necessarily discussed, a council member doesn't have to comment on their vote, however in every meeting I've been to, there is discussion. A wonderful example of my issue with this is seen in the November 2010 Minutes, under Resolution 2010-30 and also Ordinance 04-2010 "discussion" is listed, as though that is sufficient to display the rationale behind decisions of the public body.

Hopefully the minutes will improve, as there is pressure from a select few to increase the accuracy and hopefully play down the bias. Although according to the Clerk-Treasurer these minutes are a reflection of whomever writes them, paraphrased from a statement she made in the March 2011 Council Meeting. That, I believe, will not be found in "the official minutes of the Council, as prepared and certified by the Clerk-Treasurer".