Urbana citizens are upset and feeling shutout from their own government after Mayor Diane Marlin literally locked out citizens and the press from access to public meetings in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
On March 23, 2020, the Urbana City Council met at their scheduled meeting time in their usual location: the Council Chambers of the Urbana City Building. Only two council members and the Mayor were physically present, while 4 others participated using the Zoom conferencing app. City Clerk Charlie Smyth, City Administrator Carol Mitten, and City Attorney Jim Simon attended the meeting in-person.
Ten days prior, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Urbana City Attorney James Simon had proposed several provisions which would violate the Illinois Open Meetings Act. Despite citizens’ concerns, the Council voted unanimously on March 16th to close public access to meetings.
The Illinois Open Meetings Act (OMA) is a state law for public bodies designed to force transparency and accountability. It attempts to achieve this goal by requiring things like open and publicly accessible governmental meetings which must allow for public input. The OMA makes it clear that the members of the public body must be physically present to have a quorum. The physical quorum requirement of the Open Meetings Act was lifted by Illinois State Governor JB Pritzker via executive order just hours before Urbana’s March 16th vote.
However, Illinois Press Association attorney Don Craven has been quick to point out that Pritzker’s order only removed the requirement for public bodies to achieve a legal quorum through physical presence. This allows for council members to participate in meetings electronically, instead of in-person, but the OMA still requires that meetings be held in a place which is “convenient and open to the public” and that “any person shall be permitted an opportunity to address public officials” at the meeting. In Craven’s own words:
“He did not suspend the requirement that the meeting be held in a place open and accessible to the public.” “He did not suspend the requirement that the public be allowed to address the board.”
Others have pointed out that suspending the Open Meetings Act is not within the Governor’s emergency powers to begin with, since the Governor only has the power “to suspend the provisions of any regulatory statute prescribing procedures for conduct of State business.” Local governments do not conduct State Business nor are they a State Agency, so it is not clear via what legal means the Governor can release localities from the requirements of the OMA.
In any case, it seems the Urbana City Council quite clearly violated the convenient access and public input provisions of the OMA at their March 23rd meeting.
Before the meeting, an agenda was posted on the Urbana City website indicating that the public would be able to participate in the meeting and address the Council using the Zoom conferencing app. The agenda clearly states, “You will be able to use a computer to address City Council using Zoom.”
In the minutes leading up to the start of the 7pm meeting, multiple attendees from the public were repeatedly disconnected from the Zoom session. One citizen, who preferred not to be named in our article, said, “I was disconnected from the session 3 times. Each time, when I immediately reconnected, I saw the council members were still connected. It seemed I and at least one other person were being selectively kicked off.” The citizen told us that they had utilized Zoom before and had not previously encountered such a problem, and that their internet connection was “solid the entire time”.
To make matters worse, some attendees and City Council members were not able to receive audio for the first 15 minutes of the meeting. Multiple attendees posted about the technical issues in the chat portion of the Zoom meeting, but were generally ignored (Council Member Maryalice Wu did respond to one attendee who wasn’t getting audio, to indicate that she also wasn’t receiving audio during the meeting).
The same citizen who was not able to stay connected on Zoom, rushed directly to the Urbana City Building to inform the Council that people couldn’t participate in the meeting, and attempt to attend the meeting and speak to the Council in-person. When he was met with locked doors, he used the outdoor service phone to call inside and tell a City staffer that citizens couldn’t access the Council meeting. The citizen waited while the staffer made contact with the Mayor. Amazingly, Mayor Diane Marlin sent two Urbana Police Officers to direct the citizen to leave the building. Marlin made no attempt to address or correct the lack of access for citizens.
By the time the citizen returned home and reinstated the Zoom session for the fourth time, the public participation period had already passed. But it wouldn’t have mattered, since Marlin had completely skipped the public input item on the agenda. The agenda clearly states that members of the public would be able to address Council by phone or using the Zoom app. Instead, Marlin said “due to technical difficulties, and the fact that this is a learning process for all of us, public input will be taken tonight via email.” Marlin did not explain what “technical difficulties” were causing Zoom to work for City Staff and Council Members, but not work for citizens using identical technology.
Here is a transcript of the Zoom session chat log:
Can
you hear me?
I have no audio
we don’t as well
I’m trying to connect again.
Is the council aware that multiple people are getting kicked off of the Zoom
feed, and also aren’t getting audio?
Did they already do public input?
Not sure since people were blocked out for the first 15 minutes.
In the minutes before the meeting came to an end:
Wait!
When was public input???
Was it skipped?
CU-Underground could not find any other public body or instance in the state of Illinois where email alone was upheld or even presumed to suitably satisfy the public input provision of the Open Meetings Act. Restricting public input in such a way also violates Urbana’s own meetings bylaws, which repeatedly indicates that any person may address Council by “speaking”, and makes no mention of email.
It is not clear why Mayor Marlin and the rest of the Urbana City Council is so complicit in these Open Meetings Act violations. The safety guidelines provided by the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District, and by Govenor Pritzker could easily be followed while still allowing for open meetings. Marlin has repeatedly cited Governor Pritzker’s emergency order as the reason behind her decisions, though almost nothing Marlin has done was indicated in the order. Pritzker did not tell local governments to close their facilities or inhibit access to public meetings. Quite the opposite: the Governor made broad exemptions for the operations of government and the press, specifically to keep those essential activities intact. Governor Pritzker himself has held multiple live-attendance press conferences during and after his executive order where members of the public were permitted to attend and ask questions.
Ward 4 Alderman Bill Brown seemed to have weighed the situation with great clarity when he spoke on March 16th, though he seems to have since forfeit these principles:
“I’d be very disappointed if we didn’t meet physically. At least, somebody be here. …We have an obligation to the public to be open, and especially in intense situations, we need to show transparency, we need to show clear objectives. And I’d be very disappointed if it wasn’t open, so that anybody could come in and participate in meetings. They wouldn’t have to have a computer, they wouldn’t have to have a special cell phone, they wouldn’t have to setup software. So I’d be very disappointed if we didn’t have a physical presence. I’ll just say as far as the public health aspect: there’s a recommendation of 10 [maximum people per gathering], I understand how that’s calculated, but with the safeguards we have in place here, you have to take into consideration the social distancing that we’re doing that’s proven to be effective. So, I would be disappointed to not have a physical presence.”
The video of the meeting, as posted by the City of Urbana, can be seen below. However, Urbana does not include most of the Zoom video or any of the Zoom chat in their video.
