Corrections to Board Minutes

[Guest K Willis]

I am looking for direction on approval of minutes.  Our board of 18 adopts a consent agenda to approve the minutes and the agenda for the meeting.  One board members seems to think he needs to correct spelling and grammatical errors.  I thought the minutes were to document the actions of the board and we should not need to correct minors errors that do not change the meaning of the document.  Further the minutes accepted include board minutes and Executive Committee minutes.  A member who is not on the executive Committee should not be able to correct those minutes since they were not at the meeting.  Correct? 

[Richard Brown]

It is up to the assembly itself to decide whether to correct spelling, grammatical, and typographical errors in the minutes. RONR has no specific guidance on that specific issue. Some organizations prefer that the minutes be grammatically correct with correct spelling and punctuation and some organizations don’t care.  A member certainly has the right to suggest such corrections. It is up to the assembly to determine whether to agree to those suggested corrections.

21 minutes ago, Guest K Willis said:

Further the minutes accepted include board minutes and Executive Committee minutes.  A member who is not on the executive Committee should not be able to correct those minutes since they were not at the meeting.  Correct? 

No, that is not correct.

First, it is unusual that the full board is approving the minutes of the executive committee. Normally, per the rules in RONR, each body approves its own minutes. However, since you apparently have a policy of having the full board approve minutes of the executive committee, all members of the board have the right to participate in that approval unless you have a rule to the contrary.  I do suggest that you should actually have the executive committee approve it’s own minutes

Finally, final approval of the minutes is not actually voted on. Instead, individual corrections to the minutes should be voted on, unless they are approved by unanimous consent, and once there are no further corrections the chair simply declares the minutes approved.

Edited July 27, 2021 at 03:19 PM by Richard Brown
Typographical correction

[Bruce Lages]

It seems to me that reading and approval of the minutes is not an appropriate item for inclusion in a consent agenda (what RONR calls a consent calendar (41:32). First, it is already the first item in the standard order of business as defined by RONR (3:16), so it is not something that needs to introduced by the usual methods of introducing items for consideration. Second, it should certainly not be one of the items that is "considered in gross without debate or amendment" (41:32).

Perhaps you could tell us what this board's goal is in including approval of the minutes in a consent agenda?

[Josh Martin]

20 hours ago, Guest K Willis said:

I am looking for direction on approval of minutes.  Our board of 18 adopts a consent agenda to approve the minutes and the agenda for the meeting.  One board members seems to think he needs to correct spelling and grammatical errors.  I thought the minutes were to document the actions of the board and we should not need to correct minors errors that do not change the meaning of the document.

I concur with Mr. Brown and would add that in many assemblies, the Secretary distributes the draft of the minutes in advance and encourages members to submit corrections prior to the meeting. This would seem to be a solution to this problem, since the member could submit these corrections prior to the meeting, the Secretary could incorporate them into the draft, and it would then not be necessary to deal with such matters during the meeting.

20 hours ago, Guest K Willis said:

Further the minutes accepted include board minutes and Executive Committee minutes.  A member who is not on the executive Committee should not be able to correct those minutes since they were not at the meeting.  Correct? 

The Executive Committee should be approving its own minutes.