On May 27th, 2020, Assistant Illinois Attorney General Matt Hartman issued a letter to Urbana Mayor Diane Marlin requesting information about alleged Open Meetings Act violations that occurred on March 23rd (CU-Underground first covered this incident in an article here).
Hartman determined that an investigation was warranted after an Urbana resident filed a complaint with the Public Access Counselor at the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. The complaint alleges that Mayor Marlin violated multiple clauses of the Illinois Open Meetings Act (OMA):
- The City did not post the meeting agenda 48 hours before the meeting.
- Mayor Marlin and City Clerk Charlie Smyth violated the public input provision of the OMA by skipping public input at the March 23rd meeting.
- The Urbana City Council, Mayor Marlin, and City Clerk Charlie Smyth violated the provision of the OMA which says that “any person may record the proceedings at meetings required to be open by this Act by tape, film or other means” when they disabled the recording feature on Zoom.
- The City Council and Mayor Marlin violated the requirement that meetings be held in a place which is “convenient and open to the public”.
The most notable part of the 5 page complaint is the portion about Marlin skipping public input at the meeting. The meeting agenda produced by Charlie Smyth clearly described how public input could be given by telephone or by using the Zoom conferencing app. However, when the time for public input arrived, Marlin read from a prepared statement:
“Due to technical difficulties and the fact this is a learning process for all of us, public input will be taken tonight via email. You can email it to cityclerk@urbanaillinois.us, comments will be entered into the record.”
Marlin made it sound as though last-minute technical problems made it so that the public would not be able to speak during the meeting. However, leaked emails (which were originally concealed by City Clerk Charlie Smyth) reveal otherwise. Smyth wrote to staff on March 20th:
“We are going to need to sit on the agenda for Monday until as late as possible today. The mayor is only wanting public participation via email.”
Marlin and Smyth had decided more than three days before the March 23rd meeting to skip public input via Zoom/telephone, but told the public that they could give input via Zoom/telephone anyways. Then, during the meeting, Marlin pretended that there were “technical difficulties”. When a resident tried to obtain email records about the incident, instead of handing them over as required by state law, Smyth concealed them.
A full copy of the investigation letter from Assistant Illinois Attorney General Matt Hartman, including the original complaint, can be seen here: