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Councilors seek clearer sponsorship fields in eCouncil; city attorney flags public‑meetings risks
Summary
The governance committee discussed adding a separate sponsor/cosponsor field in the council's eCouncil system so the public can more clearly see who led or supported measures. City Attorney Robert Taylor warned that mass cosponsorship before public consideration can raise complaints under the public meetings law.
Councilors on the Governance Committee debated June 9 whether to add distinct sponsor and cosponsor fields in the city’s eCouncil system so that the public — and reporters — could more easily identify who led a bill and who lent support.
Keelan, from the council clerk’s office, said the current eCouncil “introduced by” field has been used to represent both the introducer and sponsors and that the web team can add fields but must schedule the work into regular development sprints. Councilors asked whether the system could offer two tiers — a lead sponsor line and a cosponsor line — and whether clerks would require introducers to approve any added sponsors.
“Robert Taylor, city attorney, said the legal issue is not about whether you can add cosponsors; it is about optics and the public‑meetings law,” the committee heard. Taylor advised that while adding names as cosponsors is legally possible, large numbers of sponsors on a measure that has not been publicly discussed could prompt complaints under the public‑meetings law. “I do worry about how it looks…if you in fact start doing that a lot, it's gonna raise a lot of questions,” Taylor said.
Keelan told the committee that the clerk’s office already treats each named introducer as having approved the item for administrative completeness; authors and editors added to an item in eCouncil can edit sponsorship fields. Several councilors said their goal was largely credit and clarity — to identify who did the bulk of drafting or who championed an idea — rather than to assign new formal powers to sponsors.
The committee agreed there was support for two tiers of attribution (lead sponsor and cosponsors or sponsor/cosponsor) and for issuing guidance to council offices in the short term. Members also agreed that any codified limits (for example, limiting early cosponsors to a small number) would need to be considered in a future rules package rather than in an immediate guidance memo.
