On March 19th, 2020, the Champaign County Board attempted to hold their first electronic board meeting in an effort to promote social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. District 4 County Board Member Jim McGuire called the virtual meeting an “utter failure”, and one citizen who watched the meeting described it as a “Saturday Night Live skit”, saying, “If you’re game for 1.5 hours of incompetence, there’s lots of humor there.”
This meeting may serve as an example for what is to be expected from local government going forward. The City of Champaign and the City of Urbana have passed ordinances and adopted policies which indicate similar ‘virtual’ meetings are expected from all of the local public bodies going forward.
In an attempt to follow advice for preventing transmission of COVID-19, the Board changed their usual horse-shoe table configuration, and setup the desks in staggered and isolated configuration, somewhat resembling a fleet of ships. Some Board members were sequestered to other rooms, only able to participate electronically, and other Board members attempted to join the discussion from home, utilizing the Zoom conferencing app.
The result was a meeting that started late and then suffered through about 10 minutes of nauseating audio feedback and distortion, which made the simple act of calling attendance nearly impossible. Throughout the meeting, which was chaired by Champaign County Executive Darlene Kloeppel, participants had difficulty hearing each other and speaking about important issues. Mike Ingram of District 6 said “this is like the Wild West, none of us know what’s going on.” Some clips of the problems can be seen in a shortened version of the meeting here:
The same type of electronic participation was expected from citizens who wished to address the Board. In Illinois, convenient access and audience participation in public meetings is a protected right under the Open Meetings Act. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has lifted the physical quorum requirement on the members of the public body during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allows for members to participate and vote electronically. However, the public body still must follow the convenient access and public participation provisions at every meeting for citizens.
When District 3 County Board Member Aaron Esry noticed that Darlene Kloeppel had skipped multiple citizens who wanted to participate in public input, he brought the issue to the attention of the board. Kloeppel, however, told Esry that audience participation was over. Kloeppel then directed members of the public to disconnect from the Zoom conferencing application because the extra participants were making it more difficult for her to run the meeting. It took the urging of two more Board members: Chris Stohr of District 10, and Kyle Patterson of District 7, before Kloeppel finally agreed to return to public participation.
Kloeppel also skipped counting votes on agenda items for some members because of temporary disconnections or audio difficulties which made tallying votes inconvenient.
For this meeting, the effort to effect social distancing may have had done the opposite of what was intended. Board members and technical staff can frequently be seen leaning in close to speak to each other, exchanging broken microphones, and rolling their previously isolated chairs nearer to one another so they could speak to each other.
District 4 County Board Member Jim McGuire issued his view of the virtual meeting:
“I think this is an utter failure. I know we’re trying to do this because of the Corona virus. But, there’s a failure in communication, we can’t address people appropriately, we just changed our agenda twice, we haven’t even started the real agenda, we can’t see who’s talking or what’s going on. In the future, I hope we don’t try to attempt this again.”
Next in line on the virtual meetings calendar is the Urbana City Council Meeting on the evening of March 23rd. Urbana has closed its doors to citizens and the press during their meeting, and indicated that only those with the means to participate electronically will be allowed access. What exactly that access will look like going forward, for any of the public bodies in Champaign County, isn’t entirely clear, but things are certainly off to a bumpy start.