The Norman City Council meeting held Jan. 27 was in violation of the intent of open meeting law, said city council member Tom Kovach.

Norman officials held its biweekly meeting as planned, despite icy road conditions, with fewer than 20 residents in attendance. Kovach said he thinks nothing was discussed at the meeting that couldn’t have been postponed or added to another meeting.

In a unanimous vote, the council amended an ordinance to reduce the amount of money or letter of credit developers or property owners must post to ensure landscaping is installed in new parking lots, Kovach said. The ordinance was written to require a monetary guarantee or credit letter equal to 150 percent of the landscaping installation cost.

The council voted to reduce the amount to 50 percent of the cost, Kovach said.

“The intent of the open meeting law was to have public officials make things readily available to the public,” Kovach said.

City council member Bob Thompson said he thinks the council should have been consulted about the status of the meeting and said they should have taken into consideration the public’s participation because it’s “common courtesy.”

“Kovach’s position is correct,” Thompson said. “Watching TV is not the same as attending the meeting, where you can comment over something you feel needs to be said,” Thompson said.

The decision to have the meeting was made at noon that day by the mayor, the city manager and the city works manager, who discussed the road conditions and the agenda.

“In the past 40 years there has only been one city council meeting canceled in Norman,” Norman Mayor Cindy Rosenthal said. “It was last year during the ice storm, and that was because there was no electricity.”

She said the city’s office sent an e-mail to all council members Jan. 26 telling them the fate of the meeting would be decided at noon the next day. No one from the council called the staff, city manager, mayor or clerk’s office with concern over weather or the meetings, Rosenthal said.

“The e-mail was sent out by the city manager advising, not inquiring, about the meeting,” Kovach said. “That does not sound like input to me.”

At the beginning of the meeting, Rosenthal said Kovach made a parliamentary comment but no motion was made to postpone the meeting.

“We continued our business like other public offices in the area did and I believe it is the expectations of the citizens that we did so,” Rosenthal said.

Other public groups which met include the Norman Public School District on Jan. 26 after canceling school and the OU Board of Regents on Jan. 28 in Oklahoma City, even though all OU campuses were closed.

Anything on the agenda the council believed would be a concern to citizens or seemed untimely was postponed to a later meeting, she said.

“We knew people had hoped for a timely resolution so they could continue with their business as usual,” Rosenthal said.

Kovach said he received several complaints from Norman residents outside his ward because the meeting discussed changes in their wards.

“Norman has a fine tradition of not only holding open meetings but allows conversations between the people and their elected officials,” he said.

Kovach said when people are involved in government they are more confident in it, but if they feel the government is being conducted at a level of secrecy, people will lose faith in the process.

“Transparency in government not only protects people, it protects its officials as well,” he said. “We need to get people involved and adhere to [open meeting laws] as much as we can. [President Barack] Obama stated he wants his administration to answer to open records of government, to let people in government instead of shutting them out of it and I think that we should do that on all levels of government.”

Thompson said he hopes people will stop and consider the convenience of the public and not council members or the staff.

“You can see [the city council] as either a function of the government or of the public at large. I see it as a function of the public at large that is a body of representatives of the public,” he said.