City falls 2 years behind on council minutes
City falls 2 years behind on council minutes
Charlotte makes it hard to unearth records of voting and discussions
The following article appeared in the June 24, 2024, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with smart and original local news for Charlotte. We offer free and paid subscription plans. More info here.
Charlotte is now more than two years behind in producing minutes of City Council meetings; How did they vote? Good luck finding out.
When Charlotte City Council members raise their hands tonight to vote on the Bank of America Stadium renovation deal — a vote that seems sure to pass, probably with ease — you’ll have no trouble knowing how individual members voted. Local media will widely report the vote results.
But if you want to know how council members have voted on hundreds of lower-profile issues, from rezonings to contract awards, good luck with that. The city has made it unnecessarily difficult, if not nearly impossible, for most people to learn the voting records of City Council candidates.
The city has now fallen more than two years behind in completing and making available minutes of City Council meetings, a record that is by far the worst of any unit of local government in Mecklenburg County. The last full council meeting that has minutes posted on the city’s website is May 5, 2022. Since then, on the 11-member City Council, five new council members have taken office.
One could reasonably look at this as yet another example of the lack of transparency and accountability by the city government, which includes complaints about slow-walking public records requests and the tendency to shape decisions — like the stadium deal and the future of light rail — behind closed doors. Even one City Council member has said the stadium process feels “staged.”
The failure to produce timely meeting minutes isn’t illegal, because the city posts videos of council meetings with no delay. But the lack of a written record does make it harder to find accounts of discussions and votes.
The Ledger first encountered this issue last summer, as we were compiling our Election Hub, as we wanted to share how council members running for re-election had voted on key issues. With no searchable written record, the only options were watching hundreds of hours of meeting videos or relying on reports from local media, which understandably report on only a small fraction of City Council business.
The Ledger reported in August 2023 that the city was 17 months behind in posting meeting minutes. At the time, a city spokesman said the city clerk’s office had experienced staffing challenges, and that the city had hired a contractor and hoped to be caught up on minutes by the end of 2023.
Since we reported that in August 2023, which was 10 months ago, the city has posted minutes for eight full council meetings — in March, April and May of 2022. It is now more than 25 months behind.
Last month, when we asked about the status of meeting minutes, a city spokesman said a contractor had completed draft minutes through April 2023 that were awaiting review by the clerk’s office. “In the meantime, video of all Charlotte City Council meetings is available and accessible on our website,” he said in a statement.
Raise for city clerk: Responsibility for keeping minutes falls squarely on the office of City Clerk Stephanie Kelly, who reports to the City Council (not the city manager, as with most city employees). City salary records published online appear to show that the council gave Kelly a 6% raise sometime since August 2023, to $161,504 a year.
The mission of the city clerk’s office is to “provide professional support and a high level of customer service to the Mayor and City Council, staff, and the public that encourages transparency and participation in city government, accessible and accurate public information, and official records,” according to city documents. Budget documents show that for 2023-24, the clerk’s office has 9.5 employees and a $1.1M budget.
Documents also show that the clerk’s office achieved an 87% score on “percent of meetings completed, published to web, and available for public access upon request within 30 days of original meeting.” Asked how that is possible given the long lag in posting minutes, a city spokesman said the score reflects the posting of “audio/visual meeting minutes,” which apparently means posting meeting videos.
Ironically, the city’s long delays in producing meeting minutes come as artificial intelligence should be making meeting records easier to complete. There are a number of publicly available and inexpensive technology tools that can transcribe and summarize videos, though in our experience they are not good enough to provide complete and accurate accounts of meetings without human assistance.
(If you want to know what that might look like, check out this AI-generated summary we produced of the June 10, 2024, council meeting, which lasted for 3 hours, 35 minutes. It took less than 1 minute to generate using a commercially available AI tool that is $5 a month. It needs work and doesn’t contain information on votes, but it is a start.)
In Mecklenburg County, Charlotte is alone in having such outdated written meeting records. Cornelius has already posted meeting minutes of its commissioners from June 3 — as in, three weeks ago. Maybe Charlotte should ask Cornelius for some advice on how to get the job done. —TM
Related Ledger articles:
“The city of Charlotte has not published minutes of City Council meetings for 17 months” (Aug. 18, 2023)
➡️ Alternative publication Queen City Nerve typically has a good summary of each City Council meeting the morning after in its “Council Quickies” feature.
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