Public meetings

Philadelphia plans to bar reporters from attending a city-run conference this week where public officials will discuss the city’s finances and budget in an effort to attract potential investors.

The two-day Philadelphia Investor Conference, which begins Thursday, is considered a private meeting under Pennsylvania’s Open Meetings Act, said Mark McDonald, a spokesman for Michael Nutter, the city’s mayor.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court affirmed a lower court's decision to deny a firefighters' association access to redacted portions of minutes from over a dozen public local government meetings held between 2000 and 2009. The court said that because no one was in the audience at the 14 public meetings, minutes involving the government agency's attorney are confidential.

A Texas appellate court ruled that a state public accounting licensing board that penalized three accountants involved in the Enron scandal properly conducted a public vote on the sanctions in accordance with the state open meetings law, even though some of the deliberations had been conducted in executive session.

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled yesterday that state public bodies must record in public meeting minutes the names of those members who voted against or abstained from voting on a measure, even where the vote is not taken by a roll call.

The mayor of Hartford unlawfully held closed meetings with a city arena-planning group, according to Connecticut's Freedom of Information Commission.

The commission voted unanimously on Wednesday in favor of The Hartford Courant, which filed a complaint on the issue in April. Mayor Eddie A. Perez faces a $500 fine and was encouraged to attend seminars on the state’s public information laws, according to the commission's decision.

The arena-planning group also has seven days to make detailed minutes of the meetings available to the public.

 A California school district violated the state’s open meeting law by raising its superintendent’s salary during a closed-door meeting, but it will not face sanctions, the Orange County district attorney’s office said in a Sept. 2 report.  

A sheriff's deputy on Friday asked a local reporter to leave a meeting with school board members, schools officials and teachers at a North Carolina junior high while they discussed student-teacher relations.

It's a sunny summer for government in New York, where Gov. David Paterson has signed off on a bundle of updates to the state's open records and meetings laws.

Two U.S. senators introduced legislation this week that would remove the Smithsonian's exemption from the Freedom of Information Act and the Sunshine Act, according to the Washington Post.

A circuit judge in Sarasota County on Friday ordered three public officials to stop using their personal computers and turn them over so an expert can determine if they contain public information. In his decision, Circuit Judge Robert Bennett held that private computers can be confiscated to search for public records.