AG's office: Wilmington City Council violated open meeting law

Christina Jedra | The News Journal

Show Caption Hide Caption Guy: Censure compares to 'lynching' Wilmington City Councilman Samuel Guy, defiant against a censure vote from his colleagues, said the effort was a badge of honor.

Confidential meetings between Wilmington's mayor and select City Council members to discuss "high level" issues will need to be made public after the Attorney General's office sided with a councilman who was left out, the AG's office announced Monday.

City Councilman Samuel L. Guy filed a petition with Attorney General Matt Denn's office in March alleging that meetings between Mayor Mike Purzycki's administration and appointed members of the council's leadership team were violating the Freedom of Information Act.

"I believed the public's right to know was being violated," Guy said in a statement on Monday.

The meetings were not open to the public and no minutes were taken, although summaries were compiled and distributed to council members, the AG's office said in its opinion.

Topics discussed included the status of the police chief's hiring process, funding requests to the state for "fire apparatus" and surveillance cameras, the Baynard Stadium task force, ongoing lawsuits against the city and the mayor's budget proposal.

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The members of the leadership team, appointed by Council President Hanifa Shabazz in February, are Nnamdi O. Chukwuocha, Trippi Congo, Bud Freel, Rysheema Dixon, and Loretta Walsh. The team’s purpose is to “meet regularly with the administration to discuss high-level city-related issues” and provide a summary of each meeting to the full Council.

According to the city, members were selected based on "seniority, whether the Council member chairs a City Council Committee, and the Council member’s availability to attend the meetings."

The city told the AG's office that the leadership team dates back 27 years. The city's lawyers argued in part that the meetings were an opportunity to have an "informal, open exchange of information" and do not violate the law because the number of council members on the team was less than seven, the minimum amount necessary to constitute a public meeting.

But Denn's office decided that City Council, through its actions, treated the leadership team as a committee, akin to other council committees wherein members are appointed by the president.

"Although it appears that Wilmington City Council created the Team in good faith based on past practice, and with good intentions, the Team is a public body as currently constituted and must comply with FOIA’s open meeting provisions," the opinion states.

In its decision, the AG's office quoted the Delaware FOIA law: "It is vital in a democratic society that public business be performed in an open and public manner so that our citizens shall have the opportunity to observe the performance of public officials and to monitor the decisions that are made by such officials in formulating and executing public policy; and further, it is vital that citizens have easy access to public records in order that the society remain free and democratic."

Going forward, the council leadership team, if it chooses to continue in its current form, will need to adhere to open meeting laws and make their previous notes public, the AG's office said.

The AG's office said it plans to issue more general guidelines on this subject in the future.

Guy, who calls himself "The Watchman," has another petition pending with the AG's office. In April, the councilman filed a complaint alleging his colleagues broke the law while censuring, or publicly condemning him.

Contact Christina Jedra at cjedra@delawareonline.com, (302) 324-2837 or on Twitter @ChristinaJedra.