Observed every year in March, Sunshine Week is a time to highlight the importance of sharing public information and so that residents can better understand the workings of their government.
In South Carolina, governmental transparency is codified in the SC Freedom of Information Act, and the law impacts many areas of municipal government operations. The SC Press Association has an in-depth guide explaining how FOIA works, and the Municipal Association of SC has many resources to help cities and towns comply with FOIA requirements as well.
Public meeting agendas
FOIA requires cities and towns to provide public notice about the meetings of public bodies — city councils and others — at least 24 hours in advance. These public bodies are required to provide the agenda to the local news media and anyone else who requests it, and post it physically at the meeting’s location and on their website, if they have one.
Some municipalities go further than these requirements. A common way to do this is to post agenda packets — which are separate documents from agendas that contain a variety of supplemental material on each agenda item — onto their website ahead of the meeting. Some also do more than is legally required by livestreaming the meetings themselves to make them more accessible. This recent article in the Association’s Uptown magazine walks through questions that municipal officials should ask when they are posting this information, helping to make sure that they remain consistent as they share this information. Another article takes a look at handling the FOIA requirements and other transparency considerations involved when calling a special meeting outside of the regularly scheduled monthly meeting of a council.
In a recent podcast, Municipal Association field services managers Charlie Barrineau and Naomi Reed talked about many critical public meeting topics, including agenda setting, public notice and adding agenda items.
Executive sessions
As the name suggests, a public meeting of a council or other body requires that the meeting be open to the public. Even so, FOIA allows a portion of a public meeting to be closed to the public for specifically defined purposes, which is known as an executive session. Councils need to carefully follow the law when entering into an executive session. This article addresses many of the legal considerations involved in conducting executive sessions.
Meeting minutes
FOIA also requires councils to keep written minutes of their public meetings and lists what must be included in those minutes. The ways that councils prepare their meeting minutes often leads to questions, and this Uptown article covers the key points — one being that while minutes need to cover the meeting comprehensively, they don’t need to include everything said in the meeting verbatim.
Social media practices
Running a governmental social media account involves free-speech considerations, since the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution limits the abilities of the account to delete posts and ban users. Social media also comes with FOIA questions as well, since the social media content constitutes public records that the municipality might need to produce if someone requested them under FOIA. This article gives many of the key points to consider for using social media and complying with the law.