 All right. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today and we post it to our website later for you to watch at your convenience. And I will show you at the end of today's show where the recordings all are. For those of you not from Nebraska, although I don't have very many non-Nebraska people in here for today's show, but anyways, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska, similar to your state library. And so we provide services and training and resources to all types of libraries in state. So you will find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public, academic, K-12, schools, corrections, museums, historical, societies, archives, really anything and everything. Our only criteria is that something to do with libraries, something cool libraries are doing, book reviews, many training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on the show sometimes to do presentations about things that we are doing here through the library commission, but we also bring in guest speakers sometimes. And that is what we have today. With us this morning is Scott Childers. Good morning, Scott. Good morning. And he is the executive director of our Southeast Library System based here out of Lincoln, Nebraska. For anyone who might not know, in Nebraska, we have four regional library systems geographically in the state that provide, that are kind of a outreaching of the library commission. They're not places, they're not a library system as many states may think of or you join it as a member. They just provide resources and services and training and things in their area. And Scott being in the southeast corner of the state, that's his area. And luckily also for us, Scott is, and I'm not going to put any pressure on you, our expert on the Nebraska Open Meetings Act. Yeah, no pressure whatsoever. So he is going to talk to us about some changes coming to the act. I also want to say before we do get into his session here, thank you everyone for your patience with our bit of confusion over some dates and presenters in the last two weeks on the show. We did have two weeks in a row where the presenters had other things come up and weren't able to present. Last week's show was canceled because it was too late. And this week's show, which was going to be on retirement, is going to be rescheduled. We are still waiting to see what the new date will be for that one. So if you are interested in retirement, that was something to look forward to. We'll announce that soon. But luckily, Scott was able to fill in right away for us last week. So we knew that we'd have him on this week to talk about Nebraska's Open Meetings Act. So I'm seeing here actually as I'm looking at my screen and what everyone else is seeing, it looks like Scott, that your camera has frozen up, but you're still there, correct? I'm still here. Should we just drop the camera for today? I think we can. Yeah, since we're having some technical issues with it earlier, and now it looks like yours to me, it's not a bad screen, but like not making a weird face or anything. But it is just stopped dead. So yeah, let's go ahead and share your webcam. Yeah, and I'll undo mine too, because I don't need to be the only one in here. I will just have the slides up for today. No problem. It's not a requirement that we have our faces up on the screen. Sometimes the technology just doesn't like to cooperate and not a problem. So yeah, Nebraska's Open Meetings Act. If you are, I see everyone who is here today is Nebraska, so that's great. But if anyone watches this later in recording, if you are not from Nebraska, please be aware we are specifically talking about Nebraska. Check your own state. Want to make that disclaimer at the very beginning. And I'm sure you're going to mention that too as well, Scott. But I will just hand it over to you to tell us all about what's happening with our Open Meetings Act now. Okay. Okay. Disclaimers. You already gave my second disclaimer. We are talking specifically about Nebraska state statutes. So let's reemphasize that. I'll also put in my usual disclaimer. I'm not a lawyer. More importantly, I am not your lawyer. If there's an actual legal case that you're dealing with, talk to a legal professional. Today's session is for educational purposes, not actual legal advice. So just get that disclaimer out of the way. Yes, very important. For questions, feel free to put them in the chat box or at least let Kristen know. And so I can kind of keep going. I had to hide some of the chat screen, chat box on this screen so I could see my slides. So let's move on. So what is it? Again, can I talk about, Kristen, can I talk about it in the intro? So we have a set of state law that require public policy to be done in a transparent and public manner. For us in our state statutes, it's sections 84-1407 to 84-1414. This is state law, not federal law. So that's where it resides. Almost all governmental councils, boards, other groups must comply with this act. This includes governing and advisory library boards. I think almost all of our public libraries are based in either city, township or county. So this applies to you. There are a couple that are just kind of starting up and they run as a nonprofit with 501c3. That's a bit murky and I'm not going to get into that at this point. And they're like some super small ones. So that's a special case. I also want to note, during this talk, I may use the phrase public body. I am talking about the board on this case. That's kind of the phrase used in state law for this. The public body is the board. General public or citizens is referred to the non-board members. All right. So there are a couple parts in state statute about the meetings. Most important one for, I think, is advertising the meeting because it's so easy to get wrong and it has changed in recent years. So if you've been following the same protocol for the past 20 years, you may actually not be following the law as it reads that. So the state statute says the public is given reasonable advance notice about the meeting. In state law, it does not give a set number of days for this. It just uses the term reasonable. Most of what I've seen is about 10 days is a guideline. It's not law. It's a guideline. Your community may be using a different format. You may actually have local ordinance that says our meetings are posted by this time. But the public is given this advance notice before the meeting. A reason change. In communities, a population of 5,000 or less, this notice consists of either placing a notice in the newspaper that covers the community or you could post a physical notice in three different locations within the community. And those locations must be kind of standard every time you post. You're choosing at least those three for the same. Those could be anywhere in the community, library, bulletin board, village office, the gas station, the tavern, the school, whatever works best. That way the public has a chance to see it. If you're a population larger than 5,000, a notice must be placed in the newspaper that covers that community. Again, this came into effect, I want to say two or three years ago. So it's pretty new. And I was talking with what community, they didn't realize this had changed as we were talking about some other things with open meeting acts. So please be advised to take a look at what's going on as far as when you have to post. Yeah, that was something that I kind of just mentioned briefly, the fact that there's some changes. There hadn't been changes for a long time for quite a few years, I think. And I know there was something a few years ago, and then just in this year too, some recent or upcoming changes. So yeah, that's definitely something to be aware of that if you have an old, we previously had given out to libraries a poster of the Open Meetings Act rules. And we're working on getting updated ones. Our League of Nebraska municipalities has provided that to us in the past. There are changes coming, I think, becoming going into effect next month, correct? Yeah, and I'll talk about those at the end. So we're probably after that they would then put out a new poster that would include the changes. So at some point there'll be some new ones of that. So if you have a current poster that you've been using and referring to, that's the thing too, that needs to be posted wherever you hold these meetings. Be aware that it may have changed and look online for the current version of it. You can just Google actually Nebraska Open Meetings Act and it'll put you right to the pages where they have the, whether it's the current rules. That's how I do it. There's actually, there'll be a link in the documentation that I provide to you afterwards. That will have a link to the current, the current posted law. So you'll have access to that directly without having to do a lot of searching for it. Yeah, and I should have mentioned that too. Yeah, the slides that Scott has here, he sent me already a Dropbox where all their, they are and other documents that you'll all, you'll have access to all of this afterwards with the recording. Yep, yep, absolutely. All right, so, all right, so I did this slide. Let's go to the next, continue we got about the posting and advertising. There's some things that you have to have in your posting of the meeting, time and place of the meeting, the agenda of the meeting. And I'll talk more about what this composes of later, or a statement of where the current up-to-date agenda can be viewed in person and where it is kept. I'll talk a little bit more about that in the next slide. Your posted agenda can be changed up to 24 hours before the start time of the meeting. So let's say your board meeting starts at seven o'clock on Tuesday, you can change the post posting up to seven o'clock on Monday. So you have that 24 hour where the posted agenda cannot change. But you can change it in between. There was a situation, I was going to a village to visit the city board about some problems with the library board. They actually changed the start time that morning. So yeah, that was not the right thing to do, especially changing time and place. You really can't do that within that 24 hour period, unless it's an absolute emergency. So those things- Wow, that's gotten it really close. Yeah. Let's say just that whole village board got voted out as their terms ended. There are a lot of unhappy people for many reasons. But let's move on, shall we? Okay, the agenda. One thing about the agenda is you have to have enough detail that a citizen or person not on the board can understand what topics are being covered. My example here, the agenda item being listed as getting books. There's no real information about this purely procedural. Are you looking for a new collection? Are you applying for a grant? What's going on? There has to be some meat on that agenda that someone can look at and go, I'd be interested in this topic. I will attend or I will make sure I read the minutes afterwards, or I will talk to my representative and give my opinion on the matter before the meeting. There has to be enough that a person can have a pretty good idea of what's being talked about so that way they can have a voice on that matter if they so desire. This is a big failing in many of ours, not just library boards but city boards and so on, where it's just this random list. This really comes into play on business items, things they're being voted on. You definitely want to have some sort of context built into that agenda. We also mentioned you could post the agenda, which is what we traditionally do. More and more I'm seeing where, especially in newspaper ads where they charge you by the word or letter, you just say the agenda will be found at the library circulation desk and will be kept up to date, continuously up to date there. So that's another thing that didn't make the slides, but I want to mention is this seems to be more of what's happening is that the agenda is being not posted physically complete, but they're saying for more information go to this place. As long as that is able to be looked at during reasonable hours, you're fine with that. There's one village I was just talking with the other day, they keep the agenda taped on the inside of the window facing out to the sidewalk. So anytime there's a change, they can just quickly go out, tape the new agenda up and people can see it if they're really interested walking past the window, even if the building itself is closed. So that might be an option. Okay, so that would be good time if there's questions on the agenda, building that go ahead, throw something in the question box. Let's see anything pop up in the chat, but please feel free to put a question in there. I'm going to go ahead and start the public's rights. So the people attending the meeting, not the board members up front. Oh, wait, we do have someone that just typed something into the questions. Sometimes we can't see if someone is actually in the midst of typing we have to wait till it pops up full. But it's a good question. Can the agenda be posted online? Here's the thing. If you read literally the state law, that does not count as a posting. As far as current status of things, you certainly could do that in addition to the newspaper ad or article and the physical posting. There's nothing preventing you from doing it. And in fact, I think that's a really great idea, especially if you use that the current agenda will be found on the website. That's your out for that. The full agenda is available on the website. So you can work with it, but that can't be the sole notice that an agenda exists. Does that make sense? So your notice in the newspaper or the notice posted in a bulletin board or in your window can say go to this go to the library's website at blah, blah, blah for the agenda. And that follows the rule of the law. That's that's my current interpretation. I haven't heard anyone any actual lawyers going against that nor have I seen court cases against it. And that also gives you just the one place for whenever changes happen, all you have to do is change the agenda on the website. And your notices are still accurate because people still go there for the agenda. Yeah, especially in this new requirement that things are posted in the newspaper and most of our newspapers are not giving that space for free to the city. Yeah. So, you know, something like that might work really well. If you are doing that, I would probably lead towards a direct address to the agenda, not go to our website and look for meetings, then look for agendas and look for this. Right. So library, something library.com slash library board meeting agenda would be the URL. I mean, yeah. Another question. If there is a change to the agenda, do you have to like, because what I just described is you put one notice up that always says go here for the agenda. But if there's been a change, do you need to put like a special notice out saying there's been a change to let people know that there's been a change? Or do you just realize that at the time that they go to the agenda that it might be different from when they looked at it yesterday because something changed? Yeah. It kind of depends how you posted it to begin with. If you posted a fairly complete agenda, you do not have to say before the meeting, yeah, the agenda got changed. You know, you don't have to send out an extra notice. But you do have to mention in like in your meeting the agenda as of this date. There's some of that type of thing. That's why a lot more places are using that kind of out that I mentioned is like a current up to date will be found X. And it's up to this citizen to double check that right before the meeting. If they look at it a week before and then think that that's the agenda a week later, that's on them that they didn't check to see that something had to be updated. Yeah. There's nothing in state law that says there has to be an additional notice. Hey, go recheck the agenda. If you looked at it yesterday, you know, nothing like that in state law. All right. Thank you. That's the questions for the moment. Type in anything. Everybody. All right. So let's talk about the public. Not again, not the board members, the actual public, the citizens of the town or county or township, whatever the meeting is. So the public has a right to attend, record, broadcast, make notes. They have to make comments during the meeting. The public body can create rules regarding how that happens. And in some cases, temporarily prevent. But they cannot outright outlaw any of that for all meetings. Okay. So some examples. Setting time limits on public comments. So all who want to make comments have the ability to do so. You're doing this so everyone has a chance to make a comment who wants to. This is becoming more and more prevalent. We've seen many board business meetings getting overrun with public comment time. You know, the business actually takes half an hour, but there are three hours of public comment. So the board can set time limits. That is within their right again to make sure everyone has a chance to make comments if they want and to get the business done. It is a business meeting. They have votes to take and reports to read. So a board can do that. You can restrict location of recording devices so they don't impede another attendee's ability to see, listen, or record for themselves. So my example of this is you cannot set a big old-fashioned video recorder right in front of the board chairs face because that prevents someone who uses lip reading to actually see what's going on if they're hard of hearing and they're a lip reader. But you can say you can record, but cameras have to be, you know, in the back so people have a can see what's going on at the table or off to the side or things of that map. You know, same with microphones and things like that. So there can be restrictions, but they can't outright outlaw those type of things except there is a thing about closed sessions I'll get to later as well, but so there are some cases where I have to remind say the library board president, they can attend and they can record the whole meeting. That is their right. You know, they can make notes for their own use. The people up front can't say that you cannot take your own notes. They cannot block reporters from all of the meetings every day. So something to keep in mind as we deal with this. So we do a question about the time limits. Can the time limits be set on the fly or does it have to be formal and like in the board's bylaws? They can be set on the fly. It's usually best if you set if it's kind of a standard. That's the best, but it may not be always possible. For example, I was at some hearings at the Unicameral and they kind of did a quick count of how many people were planning to talk and they divided up the time by the amount of comments they had. So something that didn't have a lot of people there. People had more time. Something that the room was flooded and there were people out in the hall. People only had like three minutes max. So you could do something at that time say, okay, see how many people are interested in speaking. We've got to limit our public comment time to five minutes, three minutes. And then at least everyone gets the chance to say, get their say in. Yes. Yes. So you could have a standard in your bylaws saying, you know, basically, you know, it could be this unless, you know, under special circumstances, we would like if you want to have something in your laws that bylaws that say, here's what we have for that. We allow this much time, but changes can be made depending on the situation. Yeah, that is my understanding for your own internal policy. I do also want to caution you that if you are writing something like that, give yourself the maximum amount of flexibility you can. Sometimes stuff just pops up out of nowhere. I was at a village board meeting where 10% of the population were actually at the meeting wanting to talk. Wow. Yeah, there were multiple issues at that meeting. So was there another question there, Krista? Nope, that was it. Okay. Let's continue on here. The public body, so the board cannot require the public to identify themselves to simply attend the meeting. So anyone can walk into the village board meeting. Anyone can walk into the library board meeting, right? You do not have to identify yourself just to attend. You do not have to require the individual to be on the agenda prior to the meeting just to make comments on something on the agenda. So you cannot require a pre-authorization for public comment. Hopefully I made that part clear. The board can require someone making a public comment to disclose name and address unless there is some protection order, you know, with this protection program thing, law enforcement are on the case. But you can say so-and-so from, you know, this place in the village because if you're talking about something that affects the community and some outsider is making a big stink about it, well, do you really have to listen to that person when everyone else in the community is okay with what's going on? So you can make that distinction for an actual public comment. And you can't have some meetings currently without time for public comment. There was a bill that got introduced last year or a year before that to remove that ability. That didn't pass. But you can say, you know, this is a working meeting on policy. We're not doing the vote at this meeting. We're doing it next week. And so we'll take public comment then. Or today is your day for public comment. We won't take public comment at the next meeting on this issue. You can do that as long as there is some time for public comment. And generally, it's a bad idea to continuously not have public comment and just do it at some random meeting without much notice. That falls into that bending the rules type of thing that you would still get kind of, I don't want to say punished for, but you certainly could have the county attorney or the state attorney general telling you that you can't do that. So hopefully I'd be that clear. There are some flexibility in this, but you can't withhold the public's rights continuously. That's the main thing to remember. And let's touch on something Crystal already brought up, posting of the act. Okay, so previously you didn't even have to have it posted. You could just have it available somewhere that's easily accessible. Court cases have kind of changed that interpretation. There has to be a semi permanent post. That does not mean you have to have one of those league of municipalities posters. You could have like all of the pages of the act in a binder attached by a rope on the bookcase away from the front, you know, the board table. So it's still kind of a semi permanent fixture. You point out where it's at. People can refer to it during the meeting and it can't get easily taken out of the room. So that's kind of where you need to have your mind on that posting requirements. A poster works back because it's there. Everyone can see it. You can see someone taking it off the wall or rolling it up. So a poster is probably your best option, but you know, you can print out the pages of the act and stick those on your wall. And that will suffice. Just as long as, you know, it's not tucked away and so someone could remove it. There were some cases where someone put like a binder up on the board table where the board was having active discussions. That did not satisfy requirements because there's a lot of pressure not to approach that table during the meeting. Because it's, you know, you're now making a spectacle of things. So that's why they don't like something right at the board table where the board members are doing business. So hopefully that kind of clears up the requirements. Again, those posters are the best because they're big. They're, you know, put them on the wall and you've got to take care of. So before I get into minutes, are there more questions on the public posting bit? Yes. Let's see here. All right. Laurie just posted something pretty long here, so I'm going to read it all. We have the open meetings law in a frame is hung on the wall in our board room. If we need a larger room, we take it off the board room wall and prop it up on a table against a wall in the conference room. Okay. Does that work or do we actually need to hang it up if the meeting is in a larger room? Okay. If it's still in that big frame, I think that counts because no one's going to be able to, you know, tuck it underneath a jacket and run out the door. It's really, you know, accessible by the public to refer to. So I think you probably would be fine with that. Yes. It's poster size. It's that big poster one. So yeah. Yeah. I haven't seen anything in the annotations of this act against, you know, something like that. Again, the main focus is can it be easily looked at during the meeting without interfering in the business of the meeting? And will it be very noticeable if someone tries to remove it from the room? Those are kind of going to be your keys as far as interpretation goes. So that table would be somewhere similar to where you would have put it on the wall, but just like on this over to the side somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. Or an easel or something. Sure. You know, so that would work. There are some libraries. I know they have like one poster of the Open Meeting Act, but they move that from room to room depending on which room has the actual meeting. Sure. In their case, they don't have it in a frame. So they just like use some of that poster putty, put it up on the wall. So that works. Okay. Thank you. All right. Any more on the posting part of that? No, not right now. All right. So let's get to minutes. This is another thing where sometimes we kind of lose our way on. So in the minutes, minutes shall include time and place of the meeting, the members present and absent, and the substance of all matters discussed. And so it's not just here's a copy of the agenda and we took out agenda and replaced it with minutes. And that's what we did. There has to be some discussion on what happened, what was brought forward, so that way it can be referred to later. Any vote will be done by a roll call vote, with each member's vote recorded in the minutes. This roll call vote could be waived if you're doing a secret ballot for officers. That's about the only reason why you could skip that. I know this is one of those cases where we tend not to do it because often it's a unanimous thing, but the vote still has to be done by roll call. That's in the state statute. Minutes and all documentation received or disclosed will be available for public within 10 days of the meeting. If you're a smaller community, you can get another 10 days if the person in charge of the minutes falls ill because usually in those cases there's only one note taker. And so if they can't fulfill it because they go to the hospital, you're given some leeway. So here's the thing where I've heard many different interpretations from city attorneys, the documentation. Most of the interpretations I've seen is if, say, the librarian goes to library board meeting and shares a copy of the training or the program calendar for the upcoming month, that should be included in with the rest of the minutes because it was dispersed at the meeting. There are some city attorneys that say as long as the information is in the written minutes, you don't need that extra piece of paper. So there is, depending on how your city attorney is handling it, that could change how you actually implement that part of state law. I'm not going to argue for or against any city attorneys because they're the ones who would be defending you if someone does create a stink about something. So ask for their advice and follow that. If they don't give you any advice, I tend to suggest any document that's passed out during the meeting has to be available for the public during the meeting anyway. I will put that in the minute so your minutes could just say refer to this document instead of recreating it in the actual minutes. So that's what those things that a lot of people handle differently because their attorneys interpret it differently and there's not a good court case that really defines what should be. Okay, we do have a question about the voting. Let's see, let us know. We do a roll call vote, but stay in the minutes by voice vote, unanimous approval or specify who, for and against if there's division. Okay, for unanimous approval, since all members present are listed as well. Most of the interpretations I've seen are now okay with that, especially if you list out like abstentions. Say Bob doesn't vote and so you list Bob as the abstention. You can still figure out fairly easily who voted for, who voted against, who abstained. But then I've seen other interpretations where it's like, no, it has to be a person vote and it's recorded per person. So you have like five lines, you know, like Bob, yay, Jan, nay, you know, again, that's one of those how's your city attorney going to defend that. If in doubt, I say list them. List them more check and see if your city attorney has a preference that they want you to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, for the abstentions, of course, yeah, they would list those definitely. Yeah, but you definitely at least, at the very least, make sure it's shown who vote, you know, someone can look at it and say, I know how this person voted on this issue. Right. Not many people do this, but some people do. They look at how their representatives vote on issues and that decides if they will support that person's campaign, whether they're elected or appointed and there's public input on that appointment or whatnot. It has to be available to someone so they can see how the representatives are voting on things that they may be interested in. That's the key point to remember in that vote. If you're following something that helps someone figure that out, I think you're okay. Again, I'm not your lawyer, so talk with your city attorney if you're really worried about how that handles or look at how the village board or city council handles vote recording and follow that lead. I mean, we now even have to talk with the city attorney. If you've got that sample, you can just kind of copy that you're following the procedures of the city. Right. Yeah, there may be something already out there that says what all city boards should be doing as far as your city is concerned. Yeah. We do have a question about making the minutes and documentation available to the public. Do we have to post the minutes and documentation or just have them available for the public to look at if they wanted to come in and ask for them? This is actually something I'm going to get into a little bit later because there is a recent change in July. That's a good question. And if I don't cover the entirety of that question by the end, please bring that back up. That is a change kicking in next month. Okay. Other questions on that? Not right now. Nope. All right. So I'm going to move on to closed sessions. I'm not going to spend too much time on this. Just want to let you know that closed sessions can happen where you ask everyone to leave or the board leaves the room and have private discussion. However, it's only for certain types of topics. State law lists. For most of the boards, most of the public bodies, there are four points. Some like hospital things have a theft. There's another one for land grant. If it doesn't fall neatly into one of these categories, you should not be going into a closed session. So those topics are strategy sessions with respect to collective bargaining. If there's a union type of thing, real estate purchases, litigation or possible litigation, that's going to affect the public body. Discussion about security personnel and devices like actual logistics of how that happens. Investigate the proceedings regarding allegations of criminal misconduct. So yeah, that's pretty important not to be influenced by the public on especially early investigations. Evaluation of job performance of a person when necessary to prevent needless injury to the reputation of a person. And if such person has not requested a public meeting. So for example, the library board wants to have a closed session about their librarian and says we're going to the closed meeting and we're going to talk about their performance. The librarian can say no, I want them to be a public discussion. I do not allow you to go into closed session for this because you're talking about me. According to what I think state statute, they can do that. The library can make that suggestion and have it stick. I heard someone say that they were advised that only union personnel or unionized personnel have that option is like no, this is state law, not a union contract. State law says that the person can request a public meeting for the evaluation if necessary. And in some cases that is in that person's best interests that they feel that the board is biased and they would like a public opinion. Say with some of these other issues. I have seen some cases where you know, all of a sudden there's this super secret meeting and no one's really sure who is in that private meeting and what they're talking about that is an absolutely no go. Do not do that, do not suggest doing that, especially if it's full boards. If you can't in an open meeting say we are going into closed session to talk about this and it falls into one of those four things, you should not be having a private meeting, especially with the full board. So like I said, other types of boards may have other eligible reasons, health care related boards have some health care issues that could be kept private and so on. So one, do not do this yourself and two, be careful if your city starts doing this towards the library. A little bit more, both the reason for the closed session and the vote to go into the closed session must be done in the public part of the meeting. The only matter discussed in the closed meeting is the matter stated and then any vote on that matter has to happen outside of the closed session in front of the public. So the closed session is not for voting, it is for discussion only at the vote happens outside of the closed session. Another thing where things could go awry if you're not following this order. So that's closed session. There are some other little bits in state law if you ever get into this but hopefully this is enough to keep you out of trouble. We'll take a quick pause, see if there's closed session questions. I'm not seeing anything pop up, I'll let you know. All right, other related matter, social events, this gets asked a lot. There is an actual statement in the open meetings acts that allows more than a quorum of members to get together at functions. This is a quote, I wanted to get this in there as a quote. It does not apply to chance meetings or to attendance at or travel to conventions or workshops where no meeting has intentionally convened if there's no vote or action taken regarding anything that that board has control over. So small towns, you all show up at the high school to watch the sports that all of you have kids or grandkids are at. That's fine, you're not going to get in trouble. Other social events, you all happen to be in the same building and because you're there for that event and not for a board meeting, you're fine. Even like the library book sale, there's been some questions on this. You can all attend or like a library fundraiser, you can attend as long as you're not making votes or having discussions with the other board members about library business. Some boards kind of say we'll take shifts, only two of us at a time or we'll make sure we're on different walls. You'll be by the north wall and you'll be by the south wall. And yeah, that kind of gives you that sense of protection. But so yeah, social events, things like that, you're not breaking rules about congregating. Now let's say, I know for some of our libraries, the Friends or Foundation Board often have the library board members attend or are actually part of those groups. That is one of those things where normally a Friends or Foundation meeting wouldn't have to be advertised as an open meeting. But if you've got more than a quorum of library board members there, especially if they're also voting, those need to be on their open meeting act because there is a more than a quorum of that board talking about the business that they are a board for. So hopefully I made that clear on those type of things. I know for a long time most of our foundations were library boards plus a couple extra. That was kind of best practice back in the 80s. Now it actually becomes problematic. So because yeah, now you have to follow the open meeting act if that's the make up of your foundation. Yes, I think the key here because this is something that notes some libraries have been confused about or concerned about that we're not allowed to all go to the thing. It actually depends on what you do when you go to the thing, go to the hymn. They understand, like you said, you may end up at the same birthday party or the same football game. That's okay. Just don't do any board work while you're there. Yeah. Now there are cases, let's take for example, I will often go to a library board to do training, but they're also kind of usually doing some other business since they're all there together. In those cases, yeah, absolutely make that an open meeting. Most of the business will be in the training session, but just in case something comes up here at least covered. But yeah, let's say you're all going to the NLA conference. Yeah, that doesn't need to be open meeting because that's specifically training. Plus it's training for all of these people. It's not just you specifically, your board specifically. So yeah, there's going to be some of that if you're in, if you question it, put together an open meeting notice and all of that. Just be safe, but definitely not like going to the schools. If the schools make it to state, yeah, you can all go to state to watch the kids play. So, all right. Anything else about that little bit? No, but we have a different question. I think it might have come up because you mentioned foundations. Excuse me. It says our foundation meets twice per year. We have a foundation meeting at the start of the library board meeting, and it is open to the public. Does the foundation meeting need to be advertised like the library board meeting is? So, I'm going to throw out a couple possible scenarios and please let us know which one fits yours. There's a case where the foundation meeting is opened. There's not a quorum of library board members there, and then it's closed, and then the library board meeting follows. You're right. They're treated as separate and there's not quorum of library board members at the foundation meeting. That the foundation meeting would not need to be advertised. Another way I've seen this handled is the foundation meeting happens with all of the board member, library board members there, and then it just, they stop their business, then move straight into the library board business. That would have to be considered part of the library board meeting because the quorum is there, and it's, and they're and they're specifically about library business. I don't know which method you would use. There's would fall under number two there, the second example. Yeah. Yeah, so in that case, you would definitely want to consider that a library board meeting with the foundation as an agenda item. That's probably your best way of handling that, especially as you're expected the library board to be part of that discussion and all of that, which is fine. I mean, that's a good way to make sure there's communication going between those two parties. So you don't end up kind of doing these separate paths, which sometimes happen. So I'm not, I don't want to discourage you from doing that because that is actually a really good thing to do. Just you need to post it as a library board meeting with a foundation component where you're inviting the foundation to be at the meeting. So that's a really good question. So anything else with the previous bit? Okay, so some more clarification about the foundation meeting and the board being being kind of together. So can the foundation have a separate agenda but simply listed as an agenda item on the library board meeting? Okay, it kind of depends what those items are, to be honest. Because if you're just talking general fundraising, you probably don't need to list that. But if you're talking about we're planning the next library renovation or stuff like that, you may want to list that in the... You probably want that as a specific item on the library board meeting as well. Exactly. And so those are the type of things where it did that, went in doubt, listed. You're better to bore the citizens with too much information than not give them anything to work on. That's kind of where I would go with that. Now that said, we mentioned quorum. I don't think I define that. State statute says your quorum of your board is majority. So a five person, you have three people being quorum. There are some cases where just having two representatives of your board will do fine. And then you don't need to treat it as an open meeting act. So that is something else to think about. You don't want to continuously do a bunch of two-member meetings with the same group though, because said that there's a clause in there that says, basically, if you're doing all these other things, we allow to get around open meeting act, but it's obvious that you're doing that, you will still get punished for it. Yeah. So that's something to think about too. You may have some options where, well, we don't need all five. If we just send two, we're still getting all the coordination we need and we don't need to create an open meeting for that. So while I'm waiting for more questions, I'm going to talk about consequences here because we are running a little short of time. There are consequences in the act if you violate Open Meetings Act. Two of the big ones is, if you hold a meeting that doesn't follow open meeting act regulations, someone could sue and anything that was decided in that meeting could be, the judge could say that decision is now null and void. It never happened. Either start over, but you can't use any new information that was brought forward in that meeting. You have to start over, which could be very damaging if you're, the board is discussing contracts or policy and you're enforcing it, then there's a suit and now you can't enforce that policy but still a problem. Now you have to recreate a policy. So that's one of the big things for the organization. For individuals, a public body that knowingly violates or conspires to violate could be found with these misdemeanors and so there's fines for the individuals, possible jail time if it's a common recurrence. So again, there are penalties for this. That's why I'm trying to stress that follow these things so you don't get yourself into trouble. So those are consequences to keep in mind. There have been a lot of court cases on Open Meeting Act. Outside of criminal, it's probably one of the most litigated things in government. So it does happen. Yeah, but I think there's this many, there's, I've heard from more than I am comfortable with libraries talking about their library board or their city boards not following things in the act and just the city or the mayor or city administrator saying, man, what's going to happen though? We'll do whatever we want. This is what will happen and yes, the law does apply to you. There is no one where there's no we're too small to have to worry about this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. From the villages of, you know, I don't know if it counts for a minority since there's only one person there, but for, you know, anyone larger than that to Omaha, it covers all of us the same way. There's only the posting requirements based on size and then some of the minutes requirements as far as timing of posting. I think it applies to all of us in this state if you're on a public body. So yeah, all right. Quickly, I want to talk about some upcoming changes. These kick in next month. They were passed here recently. So there's one bill. And I think this touches on an earlier question. There was a thing that passed in 2021. It got revised here in this last legislative session. So the minutes, the electronic copy could count as the reviewable copy for the public. So someone comes to the library and says, can I have a copy of the minutes offering them a PDF through email counts? You could do that. You do not have to do a print copy on demand if they will accept the electronic copy. The revision mandates that cities over 5,000 makes the agenda and minutes available on their website and must remain available for at least six months. So I think the question before was, does this count towards? It's like, now it's mandatory for our larger communities. But I don't think it counts as that newspaper posting requirement. This is in addition to? Yes. And then the website, that could be the library or the city, as far as I'm understanding it. Again, brand new bill, no one's had a suit against it. So we could see this kind of get altered over the next year as we see how this actually gets implemented. So, you know, pencil in in 2023 and then the legislative session to double check this. We've gone through like four, three or four years of constant tinkering with this. And I'm sure there'll be more bills next year. So that's one change. Another change is virtual meetings. All right. So there's a history of this before pandemic. There were some interpretations says, yeah, virtual meetings can happen as long as everyone has same access. Other people interpreted and say, no, absolutely not. Pandemic hits the governor issues executive order waving some of the things. So there's more virtual meetings. And then this last year, there's an actual bill that defines it in state law. So here are the requirements. So you could do the virtual meetings as long as everyone has access. However, any actual votes cannot be held during a virtual meeting. It has to be held ended in person meeting. So we can't all meet now, but we can vote at the next meeting. Access instructions are made available ahead of time. So people can join in. They don't have to have a live mic, right? So they could be like today, you know, the board has the mics and then you can ask for permission. And here's the really weird part. There has to be at least one physical location where the public can attend physically, have access to all the audio video copies of all the documentation being passed around. At least one member of that public body is there in that physical location. Dallas in the state law. I don't know how long that will last. Okay. That's in there. So you can do a virtual meeting, but someone still has to be somewhere that has open doors. That is open to the public. Yeah. The virtual part being open to the public, that can happen as well. But you have to also have a physical location for the public to go to. Again, we'll probably see this kind of reinterpreted over the next year as people start saying, you know, this is not really feasible. We might as well just hold a physical meeting. Yeah. And because of what we've gone through over the last couple of years and are still going through with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I think forcing people to be physically together is some people are not going to go for that. And how we've learned that we can do all this work remotely. There's no reason. We've all just seen that it can work. So any reasoning saying, well, it just we wouldn't be able to make it happen is null and void now. I wonder about the voting part that you can't do voting virtually. That's the one that I'm more confused about. Why not? I don't understand why that matters. Yeah. I would expect that we'll probably get some differing interpretations on this. So if you ask your city attorney how they're interpreting it, there might be some nuance in there that they would have experience to catch on to that. I doubt. And so they may tell you something else. And in that case, definitely I would go with them because they have the experience in finding these things. And they also know what's locally available for that. So but these are questions that things that are changed in state law that you'll have to look at for the coming year, July. Those are only the only two on tap. But seeing some of the bills that came in last year and the year before that, I imagine they will be reintroduced in some form this coming year. So from being a stable bill and changes happening through court cases and new interpretations to actually do legislation and like I said, it's kind of been we've kind of like three or four years straight where there's something been tweaked. So this might be something that we keep on our radar at the end of the legislative session. We kind of review what's going on. See how it works in practice. If people decide, man, I know this isn't working. Because we do have a question. If there's a physical location, but a virtual meeting option is there for people concerned about COVID, board members, can you vote? I guess that's what we're not sure or, well, from what it says there on that one line, no. But here's another virtual just abstain and then only the people physically together do the voting if they are a quorum. So this is one of things where it seems to have conflicts in actual doing. We have the legal theory and then the actual implementation seem to be kind of weird. And this also doesn't really address the fact, let's say the majority of the board is in person. But there's an attendee attending through telephone or a video link because that's handled differently. If you say this is a physical meeting, but this one person is attending through webinar, but they have the speakers and microphones. So the people in the meeting, not just the board members, but the attendees can see what's going on. They can talk to that person, have full access, but they're virtual. That is different than this virtual meeting where there's one person physically. So there's some weird stuff that will probably get ironed out through the year on that last update. Because it just seems like there's too many weird things on this where you can just say, well, we're going to have three people in that room, two people virtual, so it's a physical meeting. I don't know. I think this thing wasn't really well thought out. Yeah, it needs some clarification. Yeah, all right. So just to close, again, you'll have the slides. You'll also have handouts, full text, the current state statute. If you've ever looked at the legislature's website, if you go to chapter and it breaks it down, like 84, 1407, 84, 1408, and those are different web pages, this lake will get you everything considered Open Meetings Act in one page. So you can take it, put it to Word to do nice line breaks for posting if you want. The Attorney General also has a page on his notes on how he earned, excuse me, interprets Open Meeting Act. That's one that I always end up on when I do a search, I think, is the Attorney General's page. Yeah. So that I will say that it seems to not include the past two years, maybe past three years, new tweaks to Open Meeting Act. But it gets the majority of it and how he would prosecute if a case came to his desk. So that is important to know. So at this point, the general questions, I know I ran long on apologize for that. Actually, we're not very late. Anyways, we started a little after 10 o'clock as it was waiting for people to get settled in. So we are fine. Okay. And we'll go as long as people do have questions. This is all being recorded. If you do need to step out, leave, you only allotted the till, you know, 11 a.m. central for this, you can go and you can watch the recording later for anything you missed. We do have a couple more questions. Okay. So I had to read this one because it was long. Okay. So going back to talking about, I need to both find out the foundations related to, but if you do have any other questions, go ahead and type them into the questions section and we'll definitely get everything answered that you have here today before Scott leads. So first of all, we have here right now, would it be wise when the foundation is creating committees to make sure the committee does not have a quorum of library board members on it? Yes. If you have other foundation members that you can put on there that aren't library board members, it would probably be wise for the subcommittee to be mostly non-library board members in that case. I'll also throw out if your foundation includes a bunch of library board members, you may want to consider changing that. A few years ago, one of our communities got into some trouble in the public view. They weren't illegal, but the public turned on the library foundation because it's mostly library board members and people were making a stink about, okay, here's city folks telling what to do with private money and it just tastes right for some folks. Something to think about on the larger scale is having a more distinct difference between foundation and library board members. But back to your original question, yeah, if it's just two library board members and a bunch of other foundation members, you're probably okay with having a subcommittee doing that. Yeah, just play it safe that way. Yeah, absolutely. And that does, you know, having a foundation, yes, it is for the benefit of the library, but yeah, that kind of confuses me that it's the library board members are all the foundation. I always thought of it as a separate thing that is being put together by community members and maybe with a board member or someone involved to keep, you know, you say keep the communication lines open, but mostly someone in the community wants to be supportive of the library. Same thing with a friends group. They want to just be supportive of the library, but they're not in charge of running the library. That's what makes it different. Yeah, from what I've heard from various folks in our profession who got into it before I did in this state. Back, you know, there's kind of this push for new library buildings back in the 80s and stuff. And at that time, best practices being told were, yeah, have your entire library board plus a few other community members be your foundation so you can get the grants and all of that. So, you know, they were just doing what was suggested at that point in making up their foundations for the first time in many of our communities. Ticks have changed, you know, since then. So it might be time to rethink your membership of those foundations. Attention to public perception. Yes, especially if it's a fundraising group because public perception is going to affect how well they can do at that task. And we have one more question here. Anybody else has any other questions? Get them typed in and we'll get to them. But this is our last one at the moment. And it's about when you were talking about Open Meetings Act, again, foundations. So library boards are covered by the Open Meetings Law and library foundations are not? Generally, no. Generally, a foundation is a separate 501c3. And so do not fall under Open Meeting Act. But like we mentioned, many of our library foundations include a significant number of library board members and so even though the foundation shouldn't be because of the makeup of the people at that table talking about library business or also library board members, now you have to act under Open Meeting Act. Right. So it depends on who's on the library foundation board when it, when the act becomes needed, which is a reason to not have too many of them on that board. Foundations are not public bodies. That's the thing. They're private. Exactly. That's why the Open Meetings Act does not apply to the foundations. They're not a public body. Yeah. Like a library board or a city council or whatever. And this is, this is one of the reasons why some of our smaller communities don't do friends or foundations because the number of people available who would be involved in libraries, there's not that many extra, besides who could be on the board, you know, who's on the board. And so bringing in. Who's already involved in and supporting and helping the library. Yeah. Yeah. And so I understand that's a way a lot of, you know, it's like you don't have much choice because there's only so many people who want to be active. And so you kind of have to make do with what you've got. That said, a library foundation does not have to have the same residency requirements as boards generally do. So you may want to think about people outside city limits for a foundation if you have strict controls on your library board being strictly within, you know, the city limits. That's right, because there are people in your rural area that may use your library and want and depend on it and support our supportive of it. But because we're such a rural state don't happen to live within the city limits. Yep. Yeah. And that whole distinction of, you know, residency for boards and stuff, that's a whole other issue. And I don't want to, we can spend a long time on what the state law say versus what is your local order that say, but that's on your topic. Yes. And we do have a page on our library commission's website about that. A few years ago, Richard Miller did my predecessor dug into that because it was a big topic and it is linked off of our library board manual. And I did just recently, we did just recently have it looked over again by I think it's more complicated in municipalities just to make sure is this all still correct and none of the laws have changed. So we do have something that just dig into that if it is something that, and we do have libraries asked to ask me about that a lot. Who, what are the rules about who can be on our board? And ask us that, yeah, that's a whole, we won't get into that right now. It's not related to Open Meetings Act, but you can look up about residency and library boards on our website and ask us if you want more discussion. Yeah, yeah. If there's interest, I'm sure we can come up with folks to do a session on that down the line. Yeah, we'll see. Absolutely. All right. I don't, I don't have any more questions coming up on the questions. I don't see anything in the chat. If anybody has anything desperate you want to ask of Scott right now, get it in. Otherwise, I think we might be ready to wrap things up for today. I'll keep the questions open just in case anybody does have anything. While I'm just doing my wrap up here, no problem, feel free to type in something to think about it. So thank you so much, Scott, for coming on to this today. We were, had been talking about doing this for a while on and off and changes, like you said, changes kept happening to the law. So it was like, well, do we do it now? Do we wait? Same thing with getting posters to send out to everybody. I was actually looking to get in them last year and then wait, there's new things, changes coming again. So all right, well, let's wait for the next changes. So I'm glad we're able to do this. And I know you did this second also at your, was it at the training stratification center or at a castle meeting? A castle meeting. Yes, one of our director meetings. Yes. So I think it's great that we have this, I have gotten this done for as the current status as of today, June 22nd, 2022. And what's coming in July, this is the status of a meeting. If major changes happen again, we'll do this again. All right. Yeah, all right. Thank you so much. I am going to Paul presenter to my screen to do my wrap up here. So we should have that over here. There we go. And as Scott says, I do have his link for the slides. And so that will be included with the recording. This is our main Encompass Live website. You can use your search engine of choice and type in Encompass Live, the name of the show. And this will come up in your search results. Our upcoming shows are all listed here for the next couple of months, but our archived link shows are right here. Most recent one will go at the top of the page. Today's show will be there. It should be up by the end of the day tomorrow, maybe Friday, depending on how quickly I can get it done and go to webinar on YouTube cooperating with me. There'll be a link to the recording and then a link to the slides that Scott provided, similar to here from the show from two weeks ago. Everyone who attended today's show and registered for today's show get an email from me letting you know when the recording is available. We also post it up to our social media. We do Twitter and Instagram. And we do have links if you see here. We have a Facebook page, which I have over here. We post on there as well. So if you'd like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. These are minded along in today's show. Information about our presenter. And when we had our schedule change and then here, last recording. So we'll post on here and on Twitter when we do have the recording available. If you do want to follow us on social media, we use end comp live abbreviation is our hashtag for the show anywhere where we post things about it on our archive shows here. There is a search feature so you can search for any topic if you want to see if we've done a show about it. Do pay attention. This is our full show archives. You can limit it just the most recent 12 months if you want to. But this is our full show archives going back to when end compass live premiered, which is in January 2009. So where are we going on 1012? A long time of years worth of presentation of recordings here. But as long as we have somewhere to host all of these and have them up there, we will have them available to you. So just pay attention to pay attention to the original broadcast date of anything. Some shows will be fine and stand the test of time and still be good useful information. But some things may become old and outdated. Resources may have changed drastically. Links may be broken. Things might no longer exist anymore. But we are librarians. We keep things for historical purposes oftentimes and we will keep these out there as well. So that wraps up for today's show. Thank you everybody for being here today. Thank you so much Scott for doing this. And on such short notice, I really appreciate this. Happy to help. It's great to have you on. Next week are and I'll also mention while we're looking at this here, as I said, the last two weeks of shows got cancelled and things moved around. The one that was supposed to be today in retirement, we're still waiting to find a date for that. But the week before, which was our CES 2022 and libraries presents show presentation has been already rescheduled to July 27th. It is going to be part of, it'll be our pre-sweet tech session for that day. So if you were interested in hearing about the consumer electronic show from Buy and Pitchman, that will be now on July 27th. And I did announce that and it's on our calendar now. So if that's what you're looking for, go and register for it over there. Next week's show is our pre-sweet tech for June. Last Wednesday of every month is pre-sweet tech day when Amanda Sweet comes on and talks about the techie related things. And next Wednesday she's going to be talking about what is meaningful work and how can libraries help. So definitely join us for that or sign up for any of our other shows we have listed here. We have June, July, and August dates booked and we'll take my calendar. So and then keep an eye for when that retirement session is rescheduled. There's a lot of interest in that. So we will definitely find a new date for that sometime in August or September. Thank you everybody and we'll see you next time on Incubus Live. Bye-bye.