What a City Clerk Does

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Minutes

The first duty imposed on the city clerk under the Government Code is keeping an accurate record of the proceedings of the legislative body.  See Section 40801 below:

“The city clerk shall keep an accurate record of the proceeding of the legislative body and the board of equalization in books bearing appropriate titles and devoted exclusively to such purposes, respectively. The books shall have a comprehensive general index.”

The question becomes what is the definition of “accurate record?”  Prior to computers, clerks would handwrite the Minutes directly into the Minute Book.  The Minutes were merely a handwritten document noting the motions and votes on all items the city council acted upon.  With the advent of computers, Minutes became more formalized with titles of the agenda item, discussion, and the motion and vote.  Some city clerks even prepared verbatim minutes, including dialogue between the council members.

Mostly, minutes are action minutes in which the city clerk records the title of the agenda item and the action taken by the city council.  Regardless of the type of minutes prepared by the city clerk, the most important aspect of preparing minutes is to make sure they are accurate and to have them completed before the following meeting so they can be approved by the legislative body and recorded in the Minute Book.

I can’t tell you how many cities I have worked for where minutes were months to years behind.  In my opinion, this is a derelict of duties on behalf of the city clerk.  If a clerk has too much work and completing minutes becomes a problem, he/she should request assistance.  If assistance is not an option, then it is the clerk’s responsibility to prioritize completing the minutes. 

   

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The Election Process is Changing

I had lunch with a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago who is the Deputy City Clerk in the South Bay area of Los Angeles.  My friend is one of the smartest novices I have worked with.  I helped her with her first election and everything I taught her she confirmed either by looking for the code section in the Elections Code, or by contacting another city clerk to see what they do.  That is how a novice truly learns; not just by taking what I say as gospel.

In any event, my friend was so excited about the city’s upcoming election in March, because the County of Los Angeles was using the city’s recreation center as a Voting Center under the County’s new Voting Solutions for All People program. 

The County of Los Angeles has selected various sites throughout the County to be voting centers where voters can come in and vote at their convenience rather than going to a designated polling place.  The Centers are open to any registered voter in the County of Los Angeles.  The Voting Centers will be open 11 consecutive days before an election for votersto cast their ballots.  Voters no longer have to wait in long lines on Election Day to cast their ballots or go to a precinct where it may be difficult to park.  Rather, they can go to a Voting Center at their convenience within that 11-day period and use the new Ballot Marking Device (BMD) to cast their ballots.

In addition, the old fashion voter rosters prepared for each precinct are being replaced with an E-Pollbook that verifies registration eligibility of any County voter and allows for same day registration.  Voters will no longer have to sign the precinct roster before being given a ballot to vote.  The Ballot Marking Device is a touchscreen monitor that produces a paper ballot once the voter has completed marking the ballot via touchscreen.  The Ballot Marking Device also gives the voter the opportunity to review the ballot and make changes before printing and placing it in the secured ballot box attached to the Ballot Marking Device.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to try the new voting process and mark a mock ballot on the Ballot Marking Device.  It was very simple, and I believe this new process will revolutionize the voting experience.   After all, we are in the 21st Century.  For more information, visit VSAP.lavote.net.

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Let’s Talk About Agendas

I always enjoyed preparing the agendas, especially before all the new technology, when you created the agenda, put the agenda packets together and delivered the packets to the city council.  I remember feeling creative in formatting the agenda, and the pride, and relief, when the agenda was finally completed and posted for the public to view.  Even though waiting for late reports and rushing to make sure the agenda was posted to meet the 72-hour posting requirement caused anxiety levels to rise, there was a sense of satisfaction after it was all done. 

Then came Y2K, all the computers in the world did not crash, and technology became more commonplace.  Programs were being developed to make government run more efficiently and offered promises of making your life easier, which it did.  During the first decade, new agenda and minutes software programs were developed that promised to streamline the agenda process giving cities the opportunity to post their agendas and minutes on their websites.  These new programs were so sophisticated, the city clerk could live stream audio/video feed through the city’s website so that members of the public, anywhere in the world, could not only access the agenda and minutes, but also watch city council meetings live from the comfort of their homes. 

While this was wonderful news for city clerks, the new technology brought with it a whole new set of issues for city clerks to resolve.  In my next discussions, we will begin addressing some of those issues and, from my experience, ways to solve them.

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Public Records Requests

The biggest nuisance faced by any City Clerk is public records requests.  The Public Records Act was enacted to give the public more access to business conducted by the government; to create more transparency, which is as it should be.  However, over the past several years it has become a mechanism for what I consider abuse on both sides. 

Let me explain, as a City Clerk it is your responsibility to make sure requests for public records are responded to.  Government Code Section 6253(a) states, “Public records are open to inspection at all times during the office hours of the state or local agency and every person has a right to inspect any public record, except as hereafter provided.” In Section (b), the code states, “Except with respect to public records exempt from disclosure by express provisions of law, each state or local agency, upon a request for a copy of records that reasonably describes an identifiable record or records, shall make the records promptly available to any person upon payment of fees covering direct costs of duplication, or a statutory fee if applicable.  Upon request, an exact copy shall be provided unless impracticable to do so.”

I have always interpreted this to mean at the time a request is made, a response is provided.  For instance, if someone wants a copy of Minutes from a meeting the previous year, then a copy is made and provided to the requestor at the time of the request.  In my opinion, the law doesn’t say you have ten days to respond to a simple request such as that.  However, it has become common practice to provide requestors with a “Public Records Request” form to fill out and they will receive a response within ten days.

If I am interpreting the code correctly, the clerk has 10 days to respond to a request in “unusual circumstances,” as set forth in Section 6253 (c)(1-4).  If, for example, the document being requested is not readily available (i.e., in a storage facility) or there is a voluminous number of documents and the Clerk must collect and examine the documents in order to respond.  This then is considered impracticable and allows for a ten-day grace period to retrieve the record(s) in response to the request.

Another purpose for the ten-day grace period is to determine whether a document requested is exempt from disclosure and the clerk requires time to consult with the city attorney (or others) to determine whether it can be disclosed. 

That is the law in its basic form.  Because the law has been broadened over the years to incorporate so much more, we will discuss more about public records in future blogs.  I would like to know how other clerks interpret the Public Records Act.

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Why I Think the City Clerk Should Be Responsible for the Agenda Process

I have worked in only one city where the city clerk did not prepare the agenda and I have to say that made my job very difficult.  First, city clerks are trained on the legal requirements for agenda preparation.  In fact, at every city clerk training there is always a segment on the Brown Act which is almost always taught by city attorneys.  It comes to the point where one memorizes the code sections relating to agendas.

When the agenda is prepared by the City Manager’s office, the city clerk is left out of the loop.  City clerks are responsible for posting and publishing legal notices and public hearings.  A city clerk knows that if a notice of public hearing has been published, the public hearing must appear on the agenda.  While it is permissible to continue a public hearing, it still must appear on the agenda. At the meeting, when it is time for the public hearing, the hearing is opened, and the matter continued.  The city clerk must then post a notice of continuance within 24-hours of the close of the meeting, or the public hearing will have to be re-noticed.  Another posting requirement is when a council meeting is adjourned to another date and time that is not the date of the next regular meeting, a notice of adjournment must be posted within 24-hours.  A person who has not been trained as a city clerk does not know these little nuances which can result in very important legal requirements being overlooked, especially if the clerk is not kept informed.    In fact, I had an experience where the person preparing the agenda did not put the public hearing on the agenda because the hearing was continued to another date and therefore the person did not think it needed to be on the agenda. 

While these are just a couple reasons why the agenda should be prepared by the city clerk and/or the clerk’s office, there are many other factors that cause me to believe that city clerks should be responsible for the agenda process.  We will discuss these on other occasions.

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Basic Rules of Agendas

The Ralph M. Brown Act, Sections 54950, et seq., of the California Government Code was signed into law in 1953.  The Brown Act was adopted to ensure that all business of the Government was open and that members of the public have a right to attend meetings.   Since that time, the Act has been amended numerous times to broaden its Intent.  In 2004, Proposition 59 a was approved by the voters, amending the California Constitution to give the public access to Government information. 

“The people have the right of access to information concerning the conduct of the people’s business, and, therefore, the meetings of public bodies and the writings of public officials and agencies shall be open to public scrutiny.”

Basically, the public has access to see not only the staff report and backup material, but any correspondence, emails, or other written material received by, or sent by the City or City Council, in reference to any item included on the agenda.  This added another layer of transparency, which was good.  Before the agenda process became electronic, if the public wanted access to any agenda reports and background information, they could obtain it by coming into city hall and reviewing the public’s copy of the agenda packet, or by requesting copies and paying for them.  Any associated correspondence, for the most part, was not considered part of the staff report and usually wasn’t provided unless specifically requested. 

After Proposition 59, whenever the City received information pertaining to an agenda item, copies would be made for the City Council and placed on the dais for their review.  Additional copies would be made available for the public’s access.

Now that the agenda and staff reports are published on cities’ websites, it has opened the door for any member of the public to submit correspondence via email related to any item on the agenda, which then becomes information that has to be shared with all members of the public.   In some cities the emails were received by city hall staff, other than the city clerk, and because the city clerk did not know this information was received, it was not always distributed to the public. 

To solve that issue, some cities have created an email account for city clerks in which members of the public can send their comments regarding agenda Items.  The last city I worked for received comments on agenda items, all the way up to the time the meeting was to begin, even though a Noon deadline was provided.  Since the agenda packets were distributed electronically to the city council, all comments received prior to Noon, were added to the online agenda as a supplemental and additional copies were made for placement in the public’s copy of the agenda packet. 

I found this to be somewhat confusing and labor Intensive because all the way up to the time of the meeting, items had to be added electronically to the website’s posted agenda and last Minute Copies were had to be made for the council members and the public.  Because the City Manager’s office prepared the agenda and managed the process, often the city clerk was not made aware of supplementals and went into the meeting not knowing comments were received.

My suggestion would have been to have a link set up on the website for supplemental agenda material so that everything would be kept in one area and the public would have access to all supplemental material without having to scan through the agenda to see what was added.   City council members would also be able to access all supplemental material by going to the link. 

I would appreciate hearing how some of you process supplemental agenda material to meet the Brown Act requirements.  Please feel free to share your experiences on the discussion board.

Carol

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What a City Clerk Does

How many times have you been asked what you do for a living, and when you say you are a City Clerk, you receive a strange look and have to explain what you do. That happened to me all the time. And as proud as I was to be a City Clerk, explaining what what I did was not easy. I prepare agendas for City Council meetings, type the minutes of the meeting, respond to public records requests, post and publish legal notices, and administer municipal elections. Oh, you’re in administration, is the reply I often received.

The truth of the matter is, the duties of a City Clerk are much more complicated because while those are only some of your duties, you are responsible for ensuring a City and the various departments within, can do their jobs by having access to Council policies; the required information for the City to run efficiently are available when needed; and statutory deadlines are met,

I always saw the position as the cog in the wheel that keeps the wheel going around. A City Clerk wears many hats and we are going to explore the hats worn by a City Clerk and why each are very important.

I welcome your feedback and questions as we look at the various duties of a City Clerk

-Carol-

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