The City Manager still can't read...

Tonight's City Council meeting was the Marc Maxwell show, but in the antagonistic and deficient manner we've come to expect from him. I don't have the energy to go through everything he said or did and why it's problematic. And some things I'll just save for the lawsuit. However, there is one important thing he said tonight that reveals so much about the transparency issues around economic development.

Paraphrasing (I don't have the recording), he said something to the effect of "State law requires us to negotiate economic development in executive session."

This is completely false.

It's astonishing that he would even say this out loud in a recorded meeting because it doesn't even pass the most basic understanding of the Open Meetings Act.

Section 551.087 is the portion of the Act that deals with executive session and economic development, and it plainly says:

Sec. 551.087.  DELIBERATION REGARDING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT NEGOTIATIONS;  CLOSED MEETING.  This chapter does not require a governmental body to conduct an open meeting:(1)  to discuss or deliberate regarding commercial or financial information that the governmental body has received from a business prospect that the governmental body seeks to have locate, stay, or expand in or near the territory of the governmental body and with which the governmental body is conducting economic development negotiations;  or (2)  to deliberate the offer of a financial or other incentive to a business prospect described by Subdivision (1). (emphasis added)

Anyone with basic reading comprehension can see that state law does not require economic development negotiations to be conducted in closed session.

Section 551.087 creates very specific exceptions to an otherwise open meeting. As the Texas Supreme Court explained in Cox Enterprises, exceptions to the Act are narrowly drawn. This one is specifically limited to two things: certain commercial or financial information received from a business prospect, and deliberation over an offer of financial or other incentives to that prospect.

That's it.

Nothing in Section 551.087 gives the City a general right to conduct an entire economic development project behind closed doors. It does not authorize private deliberations over every contract term, land transaction, infrastructure commitment, legal issue, policy decision, or other subject simply because the project involves economic development.

Those matters still have to comply with the Open Meetings Act unless some separate, specific exception applies.

So this is not just a semantic argument over whether state law "requires" executive session. Maxwell's statement reflects a much broader problem: treating economic development as though the entire subject is exempt from public scrutiny. It isn't.

Section 551.087 is a limited exception to an open meeting for limited discussions. It's not a provision that allows him and the Council to keep the project a secret. Using it that way is not transparency; it's a clear violation of the Open Meetings Act.

It's his job to know this stuff, and even after being sued on it, he still hasn't managed to read up on it.