(a) Open Meetings. All meetings of any public body of the City at which public business is discussed or deliberated upon are declared to be public meetings open to the public at all times, excepting when that body has properly exited into executive session or when that body is exercising its quasi-judicial functions and is deliberating in private.
(b) Presence Required. A member of the public body must be present in person at a meeting to be considered present, to vote on any official business, or for the purpose of determining whether a quorum is present at the meeting.
(c) Exempted Gatherings.
(1) Gatherings of a strictly investigative and information-seeking nature which do not involve actual deliberations of public business are not meetings for the purposes of this section. Examples of such gatherings include, but are not limited to, question-and-answer sessions between the public body and others, conversations between employees of a public body, a presentation to a public body by its legal counsel when the public body is receiving legal advice, or a press conference.
(2) The quasi-judicial deliberations of quasi-judicial bodies whose responsibilities include adjudicative duties, when acting in their quasi-judicial capacity, are not meetings for the purposes of this section.
(3) Collective bargaining meetings with employee organizations are not meetings for the purposes of this section.
(d) Invalidity.
(1) A resolution, rule or formal action of any kind is invalid unless adopted in an open meeting of the public body. A resolution, rule or formal action adopted in an open meeting that results from deliberations in a meeting not open to the public is invalid unless the deliberations were for a purpose specifically for and conducted in an executive session or when such deliberations were undertaken by a public body acting in a quasi-judicial capacity.
(2) A resolution, rule or formal action adopted in an open meeting is invalid if the public body that adopted the resolution, rule or formal action violated the rules of public notice contained in Section 204.03.
Statutory Reference: ORC 121.22(C), (H)
(Ord. 2021-23. Adopted 12/29/21)