The December 5, 2023, Saratoga Springs City Council meeting was yet another marathon event.
Resolutions to be considered at this meeting were a moving target, with multiple resolutions added and others removed following the pre-agenda and before the actual meeting. These changes then continued to be made on the fly during the actual meeting.
Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran pulled at least four items from his agenda at the table. This is an ongoing problem that raises issues of both transparency and accountability.
Unless you continually go to the city website and continually check the agenda page, you do not know what resolutions will be acted on at the Council table.
In addition, if a citizen was concerned about the adoption of a particular resolution, they might venture out to a Council meeting and address the resolution during public comment, only to discover later in the meeting that it had been withdrawn later. If this were a rare and exceptional event, this would be tolerable, but Commissioner Moran routinely pulls items from his agenda at the last moment as he did (4 times) at the December 5 meeting.
More Violations Of The Open Meetings Lw
Commissioner Moran had sought approval for an action by the Council using email. They, in turn, approved his request through email.
This was a blatant violation of the New York State Open Meetings Law. I contacted the New York State Committee on Open Government regarding this matter, and they confirmed this.
Mike Brandi, the chair of the city Republican Party, has a lawsuit pending against the city for multiple violations of the Open Meetings Law, including this violation.
As a result, one of the items on Moran's agenda was a resolution to be formally passed by the Council that he said was crafted to address the violation.
The Contest
This blogger is offering to purchase a Mrs. London's croissant (chocolate, almond, or plain-your choice) for the contest winner for the best answer to my questions about Moran's resolution.
Here is the text of the resolution:
So my questions are:
- What documents "involving City projects and processes, and other related actions" do readers believe he is referring to here?
- Who was supposed to be the beneficiaries of these documents? The public? Other Council members? City employees?
- How does this resolution address the Council's violation of the Open Meetings Law?
Entries are not required to make any more sense than this resolution. All responses are due by April 1, 2024, December 24, 2023. I will publish the winning interpretation!
