03-21-2023 Council Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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MINUTES OF THE ORONO CITY COUNCIL MEETING March 13, 2023 6:00 o’clock p.m. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Page 13 of 21 Curtis said it might have been helpful if staff would have more discretion in a situation like this of approving something that is not necessarily in-kind, for example, the boulder wall. Edwards said maybe that'd be a good work session topic. There may be better methods to do that than just simply replacing exactly what's there. I will say for City engineering projects where we're doing the exact same work, we often employ the exact same method -- we will dig down to get everything that's bad out and we will start rebuilding those walls. We just did a ravine stabilization project this fall, different materials and a little bit different situation, but generally the same method. We built a road in and built our way back out. Johnson moved, Benson seconded, to table LA22-000068, Valdes Lawn Care and Snow Removal, 2815 Casco Point Road, after-the-fact variances. VOTE: Ayes 4, Nays 0. RECESS AND RECONVENE Mayor Walsh recessed the meeting at 7:58 p.m. The meeting was reconvened at 8:05 p.m. FINANCE DIRECTOR REPORT Finance Director Olson gave a presentation on the previous month’s building revenue, noting the City is about 35% ahead of last year and typically the first two months of the year are the lowest activity. We'll have to wait until you see the May through October/November period where all of the revenue comes in. So we're off to a good start. Hopefully it continues. We're at 16% of revenue at roughly 16% of the year. CITY ATTORNEY REPORT Attorney Mattick said he had a couple of updates. I did receive a request from Councilmember Benson regarding the Data Practice Act, and I thought it'd be useful to share it with the entire Council. The question was when you as individual Council Members get emails from residents or other citizens, what is the status of those emails? And what the law says is that if there's an email from a resident to a Council Member or the Mayor, that email is private data, meaning that if we got a data practice request, you would not need to disclose it because it is private data. You as the holder of that data could choose to share it if you wanted to. And you as the holder or receiver or sender of that email can choose to share it even though it's private, but you can choose to withhold that as private data. Also, something to keep in mind with that is if you get an email from a resident, and then you forward it to say, Adam, at that point that email has become public; the sharing it with staff has made it public. If you get an email from a resident, and they copy a staff member, that email then becomes public also. So strictly speaking, correspondence to and from residents is private data. There are other types of classification. If you receive property complaint data that's technically confidential, there is a legal distinction between confidential and private. Otherwise, you know, when we've done our trainings, generally what we've said is look, all emails are presumed public, but I think this is one of those exceptions that has come up. The thing to keep in mind is that if and when we have emails, if there's litigation, the discovery process may, in fact, require them to be disclosed. But candidly, you start with the fact that they're private. So they're not always disclosed.