Pittsburgh City Council schedules more private meetings despite Sunshine Act concerns

Pittsburgh City Council has scheduled two closed-door meetings next week despite concerns from legal experts and good government advocates that such private sessions might flout the spirit of Pennsylvania’s open-meetings law.

The two private meetings for next Wednesday mark the first such closed-doors sessions — or briefings, as council calls them — to appear on council’s calendar since a TribLive report in April revealed how these off-limits meetings might violate the spirit of the Sunshine Act, which aims to ensure transparency from elected officials.

Another such meeting had been scheduled to take place shortly after the TribLive story ran, but it was canceled because of what one council member called scheduling issues.

For years, City Council has frequently cloistered itself in a City-County Building conference room Downtown for private meetings.

In what some experts said could be construed as an attempt to skirt the Sunshine Act, council members often hold two separate sessions on the same topic to avoid a quorum — the number of members that would trigger a requirement for council to open the meeting to the public.

The private meetings, according to council members, often include discussions on public policy that experts said should happen in the open.

Council’s online calendar shows upcoming closed-doors sessions about the city’s infrastructure commission and the OneStopPGH portal where residents can apply online for various licenses and permits through the Department of Permits, Licenses and Inspections.

Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, said the narrow exceptions in the Sunshine Act that allow for some sensitive conversations to take place privately — including discussions about personnel matters and pending litigation — do not seem to apply to those topics.

She chastised City Council for continuing to hold such closed-doors meetings and for taking steps in the past to avoid a quorum, such as by having members purposely step out of a session. Melewsky said that strategy seemed to run afoul of the spirit of the law even while abiding by the letter of it.

“Government functions best when it is aided by an informed and involved citizenry,” Melewsky said Tuesday. “Obviously, that can’t happen if we have public agencies playing a numbers game to avoid government transparency. I would call that bad faith.”

There’s case law that says courts presume agencies act in good faith, she said. Courts consider “the intent of the law” and expect elected officials will, too, she said. Intentionally avoiding meeting with a majority, she said, “is a bad public policy choice.”

City Council Solicitor Dan Friedson said he is “not comfortable with not following both the spirit and the letter of the law.”

“They are excluding their constituents from important discussions that involve public business,” Melewsky said.

City Councilman Anthony Coghill, D-Beechview, said he plans to avoid closed-doors meetings in light of the concerns raised in the recent TribLive report.

“For the sake of transparency, my first instinct is to stay out of them for now,” he said.

Coghill said he’d support having those conversations publicly instead.

“Even (in) our private briefings, there’s nothing going on in those briefings that I would be worried about the public being involved in,” he said.

Coghill said he was not aware of council members discussing whether to change their practices around closed-doors meetings amid transparency concerns.

Councilwoman Theresa Kail-Smith, D-West End, said she was unsure why the pair of closed-doors meeting scheduled for next week would not be public, “but I’m certain there’s a reason they thought a briefing for council members might be the appropriate avenue.”

“I personally don’t know what could be discussed in terms of infrastructure or any portals we have that wouldn’t be available to the public,” she said.

Kail-Smith said she likely won’t attend the meeting herself.

“I think anything we can do publicly is great,” she said. “The more the public knows and understands, the more informed they are.”

Other council members did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment on the closed-doors meetings.

It was not immediately clear which council member called for the meetings.