Say What?

Item #1

PRU readers may recall our recent post -- Playing Dress-up -- about the recently held Park Ridge Niles School District 64 Administration and School Board meeting retreat.

The Crew gave the D64 Administration and Board a hard time about taking half of their meeting retreat and holding it out of town, at taxpayer expense. The Crew was only a bit bothered by the lack of consideration for how and where the D64 Administration and Board were choosing to spend taxpayer dollars.

And as a follow-up to our post, we wanted to see what occurred at each half of the meeting retreat. Below are links to the meeting retreat minutes.

-- Glen Club retreat minutes(.pdf)

-- Emerson retreat minutes (.pdf)

The PRU Crew is a lot more than a bit bothered by what we read on page 3, item 2 (Operating Principle 2: Open Communication), bullet point 4 (of the Emerson retreat minutes) which says --

• Information required by statute to be discussed in closed session and so discussed will remain confidential.

Say what? What statute? Where? The School Board members actually adopted that bullshit as one of their Operating Principles?

The only statute the PRU Crew is aware of, governing open meetings of public bodies, is the Illinois Open Meetings Act (.pdf). On page 9 of the Illinois Attorney General's guide to the act we read there are exceptions to the requirement of holding open meetings --

Exceptions: Twenty-four exceptions authorizing the closing of meetings are set forth at5 ILCS 120/2(c). Consistent with the public policy of the Act, the exceptions relate to protecting public interests and safeguarding personal privacy. The exceptions "are in derogation of the requirement that public bodies meet in the open, and therefore, the exceptions are to be strictly construed, extending only to subjects clearly within their scope." 5 ILCS 120/2(b). "The exceptions authorize but do not require the holding of a closed meeting to discuss a subject included within an enumerated exception." 5 ILCS 120/2(b).

So essentially, there are NOT any statutes which "require" information to be discussed in closed session, nor is anything discussed in closed session required by statute to remain confidential, at least none that we know of.

We get the distinct impression the meeting retreat facilitator, Dr. James Warren, wasn't worth a bent quarter and we hope the D64 Administration and Board didn't pay much more than that for this guy's time.

But if Dr. James Warren or Superintendent Sally Pryor or Board President John Heyde, or any other person would like to correct our understanding of the open meetings act, we are all ears!

Item(s) #2

For those of you interested, below are the videos from last night's Flood Control Task Force -- we found some of the conversation very interesting.

video #00000.MTS -- FCTF 10-14-09


video #00001.MTS -- FCTF 10-14-09