board of trustees meetings

[Guest peter p]

current constitution and bylaws do not specify, who can attend a board of trustee meeting?

[Atul Kapur]

RONR says that only members of the body that is meeting have the right to attend a meeting.

Depending on what type of body this is (eg: a governmental body, Trustees of a public or charitable body, etc), there may be laws that say differently; for example boards of Trustees of school boards in Ontario are required by law to have meetings open to the public. There are many other examples of Open Meeting or "Sunshine" laws. If any apply to your board, then they supercede what RONR says.

[Gary Novosielski]

On 1/2/2024 at 10:46 PM, Guest peter p said:

current constitution and bylaws do not specify, who can attend a board of trustee meeting?

If there are no applicable Sunshine laws or other superseding rules, no non-members of a body may attend its meetings, unless invited to do so by a vote of the body itself.

[Richard Brown]

I agree with Mr. Novosielski and with Dr. Kapur's comments, but would add that permitting non-members of the board to attend board meetings could have simply become a custom without ever having been voted on formally.  A custom can continue to be followed unless and until a rule to the contrary is adopted or there is a ruling of the chair (with a possible appeal) that the custom conflicts with RONR and will no longer be permitted without a formal vote of the board (or unanimous consent).

Edited January 6, 2024 at 06:44 PM by Richard Brown
Made grammatical correction