Tabling or Disapproval of Minutes

[Guest Morgantown City Clerk]

Council members at last night's City Council meeting moved to table the minutes of the last meeting based on formatting errors. No member found a contextual, spelling or grammatical fault with the minutes; what was stated of what occurred at the last meeting was acceptable. However, several paragraphs were not properly indented and some formatting and spacing errors occurred (and were sadly not discovered by our office) after the document was re-printed from another computer with an older version of Word, and then submitted to the Council for approval. Is it even possible to "table" minutes as they asked to do? What is the procedure when minutes are not approved of? The Council member offered the corrections, but the body still refused to approve the minutes, even "as corrected". A cursory search through my RONR 11th edition did not produce any meaningful results. Please help!

[George Mervosh]

Council members at last night's City Council meeting moved to table the minutes of the last meeting based on formatting errors. No member found a contextual, spelling or grammatical fault with the minutes; what was stated of what occurred at the last meeting was acceptable. However, several paragraphs were not properly indented and some formatting and spacing errors occurred (and were sadly not discovered by our office) after the document was re-printed from another computer with an older version of Word, and then submitted to the Council for approval. Is it even possible to "table" minutes as they asked to do? What is the procedure when minutes are not approved of? The Council member offered the corrections, but the body still refused to approve the minutes, even "as corrected". A cursory search through my RONR 11th edition did not produce any meaningful results. Please help!

 

Tabling of the approval of the minutes (and most other motions) is usually not in order.  See http://www.robertsrules.com/faq.html#12

 

I don't see any prohibition on the council referring the minutes back to the Secretary/Clerk to have corrections made prior to final approval.  They could have ordered the changes, corrected whatever else needed corrected and approved them but they didn't.  At the next meeting Council would consider those earlier minutes first, then the minutes of the last meeting.  Under the rules in RONR once all corrections to each set have been dealt with the chair declares the minutes from each meeting approved without a vote, but that might not be true in a governmental body.

 

And see RONR (11th ed.), pp. 354-55.

[Guest Guest]

Thank you! That was immensely helpful. Thanks to your citations I was able to draft a meaningful response to the Council and I had solid references with which to determine Council's intent (which was postponement, not tabling) that can be reflected in the minutes for last night's meeting.

[Gary Novosielski]

The citizens might be better served by electing council members who have more significant things on their minds than indentation of the minutes.

[Thomas Ralph]

In such circumstances I should have been inclined to approve the minutes and adopt a motion (probably by unanimous consent) that the Secretary fix the formatting.

[Guest Nancy N.]

In such circumstances I should have been inclined to approve the minutes and adopt a motion (probably by unanimous consent) that the Secretary fix the formatting.

 

Well said.

[Bruce Lages]

In such circumstances I should have been inclined to approve the minutes and adopt a motion (probably by unanimous consent) that the Secretary fix the formatting.

 

Agreed. If RONR considers it good enough for the bylaws (pp.598-599), it ought to be good enough for the minutes.