Has anyone noticed that under Alice Lee’s direction, Maui’s County Council is in direct and deliberate violation of State Sunshine laws in that none of the official minutes from any council meeting since June of last year has been publicly posted to the Council’s website?
Sunshine mandates official minutes be made public within 40 days but Alice doesn’t seem to want you to know what dirty things she’s doing.
This is on top of the Council Rules Lee proposed on Jan 2nd that would have stripped the Council of its long-standing authority to protect public participation, limiting fast-tracking legislation with a required Super-majority Vote, replacing it with her own discretion to skip committee hearings and go to first Council reading, with no advance public notice, on any legislation she chooses.
Lee’s authoritarian rules can easily be resurrected anytime she thinks she’s got the game rigged to get them passed.
How many other ways can Chair Lee find to exclude the public from the public’s business?
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From: OIP
To: alice.lee@mauicounty.us
Bcc: Shimizu, Robert H
Subject: Re: Posting of Meeting Minutes
Date: Monday, February 13, 2023 8:45:00 AM
Dear Chair Lee:
The Office of Information Practices (OIP) received a complaint from a member of the public alleging that the Maui County Council (the Council) has not posted the minutes for its meetings since before December and has only had draft minutes available for meetings starting from June 21, 2022. Under section 92-9, Hawaii Revised Statutes, boards are required to make minutes available to the public by posting on the board’s website within forty days after the meeting.
The Council’s meeting on November 18, 2022 appears to be the most recent meeting that has its draft minutes posted. The Council’s meetings on December 2, 2022, December 16, 2022 and January 2, 2023 do not have minutes posted. As it has been more than forty days since those meetings, please post the minutes for those meetings on the Council’s website.
OIP notes that, in line with section 92-3.7(b)(6), HRS, the Council has posted recordings of its remote meetings on its website. However, in order to serve as minutes under section 92-9(b), HRS, a recording of a meeting must be accompanied by a written summary that includes the following:
(1) The date, time and place of the meeting;
(2) The members of the board recorded as either present or absent, and the times when individual members entered or left the meeting;
(3) A record, by individual member, of motions and votes made by the board; and
(4) A time stamp or other reference indicating when in the recording the board began discussion of each agenda item and when motions and votes were made by the board.
Please note that the Sunshine Law does not require board approval of meeting minutes. Although many boards choose to approve their minutes at a subsequent meeting, the Sunshine Law still requires that minutes be made available within forty days after a meeting, even if the board has not yet approved the minutes. If the minutes have not been finalized, the board should provide a record of the meeting in whatever form it then exists, even if it is in draft form or in the form of notes. The board can stamp the minutes as a “DRAFT” and let the public know that a final version will be forthcoming later, but if forty or more days have elapsed since a meeting the board must make the minutes of the meeting available. Please see OIP’s Quick Review: Sunshine Law Requirements for Public Meeting Minutes for more information.
Because the Sunshine Law does not require board approval of meeting minutes, it would likely not be a violation of the Sunshine Law to continue using draft minutes so long as the draft minutes give a “true reflection” of the matters discussed at the meetings and the views of the participants.
However, if the minutes have subsequently been approved, then to avoid confusion and complaints from the public, it may be better to replace the draft minutes posted on the website with the approved minutes.
Thank you. Robert Shimizu Staff Attorney
Office of Information Practices State of Hawaii
No. 1 Capitol District Building 250 S. Hotel Street, #107
Honolulu, HI 96813
Ph.: (808) 586-1400
Facsimile: (808) 586-1412 Email: oip@hawaii.gov Website: http://oip.hawaii.gov
This e-mail has been sent under OIP’s “Attorney of the Day” (AOD) service. The AOD service allows anyone to ask an OIP attorney any UIPA or Sunshine Law question (chapter 92F, and part I of chapter 92, HRS). AOD advice is non- binding, general, informal guidance to the public and to agency and board personnel, and does not have the precedential value of OIP’s formal opinions.