OMADetermination Letter (non-binding)Otherclosed session

School board's closed session on extending bargaining rights violated Open Meetings Act

Date issued: May 12, 1980
Statute(s): 5 ILCS 120

Plain-language summary

A state's attorney asked whether a school board's closed session to decide whether to extend collective bargaining rights to its employees fell within the Open Meetings Act's exception for collective negotiating matters. The Attorney General held that the exception, which must be narrowly construed, applies only to negotiations between an employer and employees who already have bargaining rights, not to an employer's unilateral, threshold decision about whether to grant those rights in the first place. The board's closed session on that threshold question therefore did not qualify for the exception.

Legal question

Whether a school board's closed session to decide whether to extend collective bargaining rights falls within the Open Meetings Act's exception for collective negotiating matters.

Holding

The collective negotiating exception to the Open Meetings Act does not cover a public body's unilateral internal deliberations about whether to extend collective bargaining rights in the first place - only actual negotiations between an employer and a recognized employee representative qualify for closed session.

Summary

William J. Scott: Special education board held a closed session to discuss whether or not it would extend collective bargaining rights . Section 2 of the Open Meetings Act provides in pertinent part: "All meetings of any legislative, executive, administrative or administrative or advisory bodies of the State, counties, townships, cities, cities ... and all other municipal corporations, boards, bureaus, committees or commissions"

Extracted text (388 words)

Text extracted from the PDF. Where source line breaks survive, they are used to reconstruct paragraphs; where they do not, the text is split into display-only reading blocks at sentence boundaries. Repeating office address blocks and safely identified footnotes are removed from the reading flow where possible. Reconstruction is automatic and imperfect — the PDF is the authoritative version, and it's linked on this page.

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WILLIAM J. SCOTT

ATTORNEY GENERAL

STATE OF ILLINOIS

SPRINGFIELD

May 12, 19380

PILE NO. S-1490 \

MEETINGS:

Collective Negotiating seni Co

to the Open Meetings Act

Honorable Edwin R. Parkinso

State's Attorney, Morgan C

Morgan County Courthouse

Jacksonville, Illinois 62

Dear Mr. Parkinson:

1 you inquire whether whether to extend collective Ective bargaining exception in in relation to meetings" (I11, Rev. Stat. 2) [Open Meetings Act], You state in.

a ocal. special education board, at a time when no collective bargaining agreement was in existence, held a closed session to discuss whether or not it would extend collective bargaining rights. You advise that it is your opinion that such a meeting does not fall within the

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Honorable Edwin R. Parkinson - 2.

collective negotiating exception to the Open Meetings Act. I concur with your opinion.

Section 2 of the Open Meetings Act provides in pertinent part: | | "All meetings of any legislative, executive, administrative or advisory bodies of the State, counties, townships, cities, villages, incorporated towns, school districts and all other municipal corporations, boards, bureaus, committees or commissions of this State, and any subsidiary bodies of any of the foregoing including but not limited to committees and subcommittees which are supported in whole or in part by tax revenue, or which expend tax revenue, shall be public meetings except for (a) collective negotiating matters between public employers and their employees or representatives * * *, kok Ox "

Exceptions to the Open Meetings Act should be narrowly construed to avoid doing violence to the volicy which the Act is intended to promote. (Ill. News Broadcasters v. City of Springfield (1974), 22 Ill. App. 3d 226, 228.) tt is clear from the language of the statute that a closed meeting to consider whether or not collective bargaining rights will be extended is not within the plain meaning of section 2(a). There can be no collective negotiations between employers and employees before there has been a decision by the employer to extend negotiating rights. Therefore, it is my opinion that the collective negotiating exception of the Open

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Honorable Edwin R. Parkinson - 3,.

Meetings Act does not include unilateral deliberations by the employer on the question of whether to extend negotiating rights.

Very truly yours,