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Trainer reiterates Open Public Meetings Act rules, warns against email/text serial meetings and improper executive-session decisions
Summary
A legal trainer reviewed Washington open-meeting rules with the Camas School District board, emphasizing limits on serial communications, public records for emails/texts, and narrow grounds for executive sessions, and warned that decisions reached in private can trigger legal challenges.
Sean, the meeting's legal presenter, told the Camas School District Board of Directors that Washington's Open Public Meetings Act establishes a broad presumption that board meetings must be open and that elected officials must complete required training.
He said the law treats a “meeting” broadly — any gathering of a quorum involving deliberation or action — and warned that emails, texts and other exchanges can form a de facto meeting if they show collective intent to decide. "If you piece it together...it looks like this body had a meeting," Sean said, summarizing recent court rulings that have treated serial communications as a meeting when a quorum's views are exchanged through multiple…
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