There is an art to taking good meeting minutes.
I like to think I am a good minute-taker. I was a good note-taker in college and law school. In fact, the #1 student in my law school class always asked to use my notes when he’d miss class. (Curious how he managed to turn my notes into the best grades in the class while I, um, didn’t. 🙃)
With minutes (and notes) you’re trying to find that sweet spot between verbatim and vague. You want to include enough detail that someone who wasn’t in class or at the meeting would be able to understand what happened, but you don’t want so much detail that someone has to order an extra large coffee and stake out a coffee shop table for two hours.
It is a requirement under FOIA that most public meetings have minutes. There are exceptions for General Assembly committee meetings and interim study committees, study committees appointed by the governor and committees appointed by a local government that don’t have a majority of board members (that is, the city council’s finance committee would have to take minutes if a majority of the members are on the city council, but an events committee that one or two city council members served on would not).
FOIA doesn’t dictate the form of the minutes, it only says what elements the minutes must include: the date, time, and location of the meeting; the members of the public body who are present and absent; and “a summary of the discussion on matters proposed, deliberated, or decided, and a record of any votes taken.”
There’s a lot of wiggle room, then, in what goes into the minutes. But it’s clear that they’re supposed to give readers an idea of what happened in the meeting. To me, good minutes would also include the “why” of what happened. But that’s where things get really sticky.
Minutes often devolve into power struggles. Internally, what is and isn’t included in the minutes can reflect whose star is ascendant and whose is fading. An impassioned defense of a proposal may not make its way into the minutes, while an equally impassioned speech in support may be appear in detail.
Comments offered by the public face the same unpredictable fate: some public bodies routinely include the gist of what was said in varying degrees of detail, while other public bodies routinely exclude them.
I have seen a couple of struggles this year where a locality has not been posting their minutes on their websites, as FOIA also requires (state public bodies have to do this, too). One locality that grudgingly agreed to post recent minutes, took a one-in, one-out approach to them; when the newest meeting minutes went up, the oldest were taken down.
I have also seen citizens request copies of the minutes only to be told that they were not available until the public body approved them. If they were following FOIA, there’d be none of that, because FOIA says, “Minutes, including draft minutes, and all other records of open meetings, including audio or audio/visual records shall be deemed public records and subject to the provisions of this chapter.”
“Approving” minutes may be a parliamentary procedure, but it has no bearing on whether minutes, even draft minutes or unapproved minutes, are available as a public record through FOIA. It makes sense because if public access was dependent on approval or transformation from “draft” to “final”, minutes and any number of other public records could be kept confidential indefinitely.1
Minutes aren’t just helpful to the citizen who couldn’t make it to the meeting in real time, though that’s what we usually immediately think of when we talk about access to minutes. Minutes are useful to the public body itself, too, as something to go back to if and when questions arise about recent matters.
But let’s also remember what meeting minutes really are. They are the historical record of a public body’s action. They tell the story now and 50, 100 years into the future about what decision were made and when. Minutes that do more than give glancing details of who said what in a meeting cheat future generations — our descendants, academics and historians, future board members — out of knowing why things happened or didn’t happen the way they did.
Minutes, which must be archived indefinitely, according to the record retention schedules set out by the Library of Virginia under the Public Records Act, are the collectively agreed-to facts of an event. That’s historical research gold!
Like gold, we should treasure our meeting minutes. We should strive for minutes that find that sweet spot, that tell our story beyond a cold recitation of facts. Minutes are more than a legal obligation. They are a bridge between today’s choices and tomorrow’s understanding.
1 It’s worth noting that city and town charters may include provisions about taking and approving minutes, though I find this phrase in the Bristol charter curious: “Citizens may have access to the minutes and records of all public meetings at any reasonable time.” Please tell me they mean a reasonable time and place to review them in person and not a “reasonable” time after the fact.