In response to concerns about a lack of minutes for its closed-session meetings, the Durham City Council Monday night revised the process of approving minutes for those meetings.
Under the new policy, the minutes of meetings that are closed to the public will be reviewed first by the council's personnel committee, then by the full council, to ensure the record of the meeting is sufficiently detailed.
Under the old policy, only the full council-not the four-person personnel committee-reviewed and approved the minutes. But recent articles in The News & Observer of Raleigh and The Herald-Sun of Durham focusing on the records revealed several concerns about the detail of these minutes.
Open sessions are often televised and tape recorded, and produce thorough minutes. The record of closed sessions, on the other hand, can sometimes be only three or four sentences.
A Feb. 18 article in The News & Observer reported that several council members could not remember what happened at closed-session meetings, even after reading the minutes from them.
Mayor Nick Tennyson said these council members' needs for more complete minutes prompted the change.
"We had been asking the clerk to interpret our general policy [on closed-session meetings]," Tennyson said. "Then when some council members had those minutes read to them, they didn't have as much recall as I would expect."
The measure passed unanimously after a brief change in its wording: The original resolution called for the personnel committee, which is comprised of the mayor and three of the 12 other council members, to "review and approve" the record of closed sessions. But council member Pamela Blyth said the whole council should approve the minutes.
"I feel a great sense of responsibility as a council member to review the minutes of any meeting that takes place," she said.
But Tennyson said the measure was not meant to exclude any council members from looking at the minutes, and the council dropped the word "approve" from the motion. Under the new policy, closed-session minutes will be considered by the personnel committee, then approved by the whole council at the next closed-session meeting.
IN OTHER BUSINESS: In a 12-1 vote, the only one of the evening that was not unanimous, the council approved a change in the development plan for Southpoint Developers' planned construction of new office buildings west of the Southpoint mall.
Council member Floyd McKissick voted no, saying the measure should be delayed two weeks to ensure that the design fits the surroundings. But council member Lewis Cheek said the absence of any opponents of the change showed support for the development.
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