Judge: Chattanooga City Council redistricting meetings violated Tennessee Open Meetings Act

A Tennessee judge ruled last week that members of the Chattanooga City Council repeatedly violated the state’s public meetings law during the process of creating new voting districts for future city council elections. 

The ruling is a major victory for government transparency and for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, which sued the city council with free legal support from attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. 

In a 50-page order, Hamilton County Chancellor Pamela Fleenor held that a committee made up of four city council members held a series of private meetings, calls, and emails in 2021 and 2022 to make decisions about redistricting in violation of the Tennessee Open Meetings Act. 

The order prohibits the Chattanooga City Council from conducting any future meetings in violation of the Open Meetings Act, and requires the council to report to the court semi-annually about its compliance with the law.

“By holding secretive meetings about the redistricting process, City Council members showed contempt for the people who put them in office,” Times Free Press Editor Alison Gerber said after the ruling. “We’re grateful for the court’s decision siding with government transparency and public oversight.”

The legal dispute centers on the redistricting committee’s work in advance of a May 2022 city council meeting during which the council voted to approve new voting districts.

The four-member committee was tasked with making a redistricting recommendation to the full city council, but it operated entirely behind closed doors. The committee’s meetings were not open to the public, nor were they publicly noticed. The same was true of meetings between council members and members of the city’s staff, during which they fleshed out details of redistricting maps.

The Times Free Press — represented by Paul McAdoo, the Reporters Committee’s Local Legal Initiative attorney for Tennessee, and Reporters Committee Senior Staff Attorney Lin Weeks — sued the city council in 2022, alleging that the redistricting committee’s secret meetings violated the Open Meetings Act. 

As Gerber said at the time, “The public should have had a window into the process, and input in the process.”

Chancellor Fleenor agreed, concluding that the committee held deliberations and made decisions about redistricting in nonpublic meetings in violation of the requirements and spirit of the Open Meetings Act. 

The Open Meetings Act violations didn’t just occur when the committee met privately as a group on three separate occasions in 2021 and 2022, the judge found. They also occurred when individual committee members met with city staff members behind closed doors to discuss changes to redistricting maps.

“The Open Meetings Act is designed to prohibit the evil of closed-door operation of government without permitting public scrutiny and participation,” the judge wrote in her order granting summary judgment in favor of the Times Free Press. “Here the Plaintiff established that the public was not allowed to go beyond and behind the decisions reached and be appraised on the pros and cons involved in any of the Councilmembers decisions regarding their districts in their private meetings with City Staff that led to changes in the maps.”

Reporters Committee attorneys praised the judge’s decision.

“This ruling sends a strong message to city and county officials across Tennessee that decisions about the public’s business cannot be made behind closed doors,” McAdoo said. “That’s especially true when elected leaders meet to discuss one of the most consequential processes they can undertake on behalf of their constituents: drawing voting district boundaries.”

Read more about the ruling in the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government.