Correction appended. Quotations from Jonathan Rosenberg have been added after publication.
Student Senator Neil Brown filed a grievance with the ASUO Constitution Court yesterday asking the court to determine the validity of a meeting last spring where no minutes were taken.
Should the meeting be ruled invalid, four senators would have to again be confirmed and money to replace the drumline for the Oregon Marching Band would have to be re-approved, according to Brown.
“My primary concern is that we follow through with our history and our commitment of transparent government,” Brown said.
Sen. Athan Papailiou filed a request for clarification from the court in June after the Emerald published an article noting the violation of Oregon Public Meetings Law. On Sept. 10, the court ruled that the Senate must comply with the law and its own rules, which say minutes must be taken. The court clarified the minutes must be taken during the meeting.
There is an administrative assistant whose job it is to type notes at each meeting, but she was not present. The court did not issue an opinion on the validity of the meeting because it was not asked to do so, according to the ruling.
In the request for clarification, Papailiou wrote that the ASUO Executive and former Senator Jonathan Rosenberg later “crafted minutes over the phone.” Rosenberg said that is not correct; he wrote the minutes at the request of Sen. Kate Jones. The disputed meeting took place on Rosenberg’s last day in office, and he could not rectify the error, he said.
“I claim responsibility for minutes not being taken,” Rosenberg said. “I made an error. It was made unintentionally and it was a mistake that anyone could have made.”
The minutes attached to the grievance are far from complete.
“There are obvious pieces of information missing in these minutes,” Papailiou wrote in his request. “Moreover, I personally view some of the content listed in the submitted minutes as inaccurate and erroneous.”
Rosenberg said he never intended for those minutes to be part of any record. It was not his decision to reconstruct the minutes, he said.
“I took no part in the decision. I was asked to assist in recalling the minutes,” Rosenberg said. “It was the least I could do given the mistake I had made. To void the meeting would have been the prudent decision at the time, from where I’m standing now. I may not have made that decision but looking back, that was clearly the right thing to do.”
Summer Senate President Jones said more information has since been gathered and a more complete version will be voted on at tonight’s meeting.
Brown said it was clear that the meeting wasn’t in compliance with public meeting laws. “It’s a very black and white issue,” he said.
ASUO President Emily McLain disagreed. McLain was present at the contentious meeting and a later meeting with the University’s general counsel regarding the status of the June 13 meeting.
“The outcome of the meeting with the general counsel was that the minutes could be reconstructed from memory,” she said. She called the matter “an internal Senate issue,” implying that it didn’t need to be referred to the court.
In his request, Papailiou doubted the validity of reconstructed minutes.
“Whether or not Senate will be able to ‘piece together’ the missing information should be questioned, both in the interest of the Senate and the public,” he wrote. “While these events are unfortunate in the sense that they could have been prevented, perhaps re-doing the meeting while in compliance with the law presents the best solution for the current dilemma.”
He warned against continuing to revise the minutes at the next meeting because “there will be a clear interest for some to change what happened during the June 13 meeting into what one would have liked to happen, undoubtedly a potentially disastrous dilemma.”
During the June 13 meeting, the Senate authorized spending $20,689 from its surplus for a new drumline for the marching band.
“If the money has been allocated and spent and then not re-approved it will have to be paid back,” Brown said. “But I’m confident that those (funds) will be re-approved.
“The controversy is that there were appointments that were made and if that meeting is voided there’s a chance that they won’t be re-approved,” he said.
The minutes of the meeting attached to Brown’s grievance have gaping holes, including the amount allocated to the marching band and the way senators voted on Senate nominations.
Jones said those minutes are “not the sum total of all information we have about that meeting.” The minutes attached to the grievance contain only the immediate recollections of those involved, including former Senator Rosenberg, whose last day in the Senate was June 13. He left for Washington the next day.
“I called John when he was on the train and said, ‘What do you remember?’” Jones said.
She said the sheets documenting votes from the meeting were in Senate desks and not easily labeled. They will be added to the minutes before the minutes are voted on at the next meeting, she said.
“(Sen. Rosenberg) didn’t photographically memorize the vote sheets, so that’s why they weren’t in place,” she said.
The vote sheets contain how each senator voted on the allocated funds and Senate nominees, she said.
Rosenberg said voiding the meeting at the time would have been the right thing to do, but voiding it now would be “extraordinarily unfortunate” because Summer Senate did a “tremendous amount of work.”
The minutes will be voted on at tonight’s meeting, and “a number of things could happen,” including the minutes being adopted, Jones said.
“If the Senate approves the minutes of the June 13 meeting, it is assumed to have happened as presented in the minutes,” she said.
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