02-27-2023 City Council Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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MINUTES OF THE ORONO CITY COUNCIL MEETING February 27,2023 6:00 o'clock p.m. Council at the next meeting and by clerical error,the original draft minutes had been resubmitted into the packet. They were requested to be removed once again to make changes as requested. Council removed and tabled the draft minutes for the January 23 meetings as well. Those minutes have been prepared for you tonight as options that are exhibits in the packet. Councilmember Benson reviewed and provided corrections as well as some content additions to the minutes for those meetings. Corrections were incorporated in the Clerk-edited minutes in Exhibit A. However, some of the additions provided went beyond our normal practices and minute requirements. Therefore, a version with those additions is also provided as Exhibit B, for Council consideration. Council minutes are the official record of the Council proceedings. They should be thorough but are not intended to be verbatim. Recent feedback from individual Council members indicates a potential change in the level of detail. Therefore,we request feedback and guidance for how you'd like the minutes to be prepared for future meetings. Walsh said historically minutes are supposed to be a summary of everything but not verbatim. He said if the Council or someone else has to start going through and listening to the video to make sure everything was exactly verbatim,now every Council member has to go through all the videos and read and look at all those, which seems like a lot of extra work when the minutes are supposed to be a summary document. He noted the City also makes video and audio available and asked the City Administrator if he had any input on past practices. City Administrator Edwards said as the Clerk outlined, Council meeting minutes are supposed to be a summary, but an official record of what happened within the meeting. There are certain minimum requirements that must be met according to State Statute. We did give a listing of those as part of Exhibit C in your packet. And then there are also a number of items that are recommended by the state auditor that should be included. As a normal matter of practice, I believe that the that the minutes that we provide do include both the required as well as the recommended. And then you have the spectrum that is subjective between meeting the bare minimum and all the way on the other end to giving actual verbatim minutes like you might have in a court recording or something like that, where it's word for word, everything that was said. We as a City over the years seem to have chosen to have a little bit more detail in our minutes than a lot of our neighboring cities. But we really have never gotten all the way to verbatim. At least in my time with the City, I don't think we've ever gone to a complete summary version with just the minimums either. So within there,there's some wiggle room,that the statute leaves up to the judgment of the City Clerk. However, staff would want to meet your intent as a body as to how much you'd like to have included in there. The other thing to understand is we use a contractor or a service to provide to do the initial creation of the minutes. If we decided we were going to have more detailed minutes, we pay by the page, so there's also a cost involved with that. That's another thing to take into consideration. Seals clarified, so you're saying what we currently do is comparable to other neighboring cities? Edwards said I think we provide more. We provide more detail than a lot of other cities, including cities that use the exact same service provider that we do. He suggested the City Attorney,who represents other cities as well, may be able to give some context as to the level of detail he sees in other places. City Attorney Mattick said the Clerk and the Administrator had explained that there are bare Page 3 of 22