Hours before it was set to begin, a Meadville City Council meeting focused largely on a proposed Climate Action Plan was rescheduled.
City officials announced the cancellation of the 6 p.m. Wednesday meeting in a post to social media at 1:14 p.m. The change was necessary to comply with the state’s Sunshine Act, which requires that agendas for public meetings be posted at least 24 hours in advance.
“From what I understand there was a glitch on the website, so it just made it so we didn’t post in the required time,” Mayor Jaime Kinder said, “so we are moving the meeting.”
The meeting has been rescheduled for 6 p.m. June 9 in an alternative location instead of the usual conference room in the City Building, 894 Diamond Park. The rescheduled meeting will take place at 984 Water St., site of the former city hall, in anticipation of what could be a larger-than-normal crowd, according to City Manager Maryann Menanno.
“We would not be surprised if there are a larger number of people in attendance for that meeting than the seating capacity at the current city hall allows,” she said.
Regarding the “glitch” that resulted in the online agenda remaining inaccessible to the public, Menanno said, “On the back end, it looked like the agenda was posted. On the front-facing, public side, the agenda was not posted.”
Changes to the Sunshine Act that took effect last year require public agencies to post meeting agendas at the site of the meeting and on their websites if they have one. Menanno said the agenda had been posted on the bulletin board outside the City Building conference room more than 24 hours before the meeting was scheduled to begin.
The city learned of the website issue early Wednesday, Menanno continued, “and we did fix it, but at that point it was not 24 hours in advance, so we had to cancel the meeting.”
Had the meeting been held, any measures approved by council would have been open to legal challenge, according to Menanno. Rather than take the risk that city resources might be required to respond to such a legal challenge, it made more sense to reschedule the meeting.
The potential for legal challenge had the Climate Action Plan been approved was significant, according to Menanno, and was related to the large crowd that was expected.
“We think there would have been a high probability of it being challenged,” Menanno said.
While the Sunshine Act requires that agendas be posted at least 24 hours in advance of a meeting, Menanno said city staff typically try to have agendas for council’s Wednesday meetings posted by Monday morning, a little more than 48 hours ahead of time. Because of the Memorial Day holiday this week, the agenda was not posted until Tuesday morning and the fact that the posting attempt had gone wrong was not discovered until it was too late.
Menanno said the city is in the process of moving to a new website-hosting provider due to difficulty-of-use issues such as the error that left the agenda inaccessible.
An agenda for council’s June 8 study session, which will take place at noon in the City Building, will be posted online “sooner rather than later, Monday at the latest,” Menanno said.
Kinder said the focus of the meeting has not yet been finalized but could include infrastructure-related grant opportunities or a discussion of Meadville Area Sewer Authority plans to build a new treatment plant.
Council has not met in the former city hall since June 2021, when a regular meeting and a town hall meeting were held there. Pandemic-related concerns about social distancing had led council to hold meetings in the more spacious older building, where the auditorium seats about 100 people.
Since it was last used to host city meetings, the former city hall was sold to Meadville Medical Center. Menanno said there would be no cost to use the building for council’s meeting next week.
