December 6, 2007
Legal Opinion on LC Commissioners Outdoor Meeting

By Dave Maxwell

During the outdoor portion of the Lincoln County Commissioners Meeting regarding the proposed storage facility ordinance, that took place on the front lawn of the Lincoln County Courthouse November 5, a question was raised by a member of the public about whether the meeting was even legal, since it may have violated provisions of the Nevada Open Meeting Law.

County Manager John Lovelady thought it best to put this question to District Attorney Greg Barlow: Did the Board violate Nevada Open Meeting laws by relocating the meeting to a different area of the building without a motion, action or a new notice as set forth in chapter 241 of the Nevada Revised Statutes?

Assistant District Attorney Daniel Hooge responded in a memo to Mr. Lovelady November 13, and stated in part …Under NRS 241.020, “except as otherwise provided by statute, all meetings of public bodies must be open and public, and all persons must be permitted to attend any meeting of these bodies.” Public meetings should be held in facilities that are reasonably large enough to accommodate attendance by members of the public. A public body, however, need not hold its meetings in a facility to accommodate the entire citizenry that might attend a public meeting, but “officials should certainly be sensitive to the fact that, when public meetings are heightened, the attendance at meetings will be correspondingly greater. At such times, reasonable attempts should be made to accommodate large numbers of citizens.” A public body’s failure to conduct an open meeting in a large enough facility, in effect, creates an improperly closed meeting.

In the case of the Lincoln County Commission, although they did not make a formal motion to move the meeting from the courtroom to outside, they did hold the meeting in an area large enough to accommodate attendance by the public. ADA Hooge cited the 1981 case of Gutierrez vs. City of Albuquerque in which the court concluded that a “rule of reasonableness must be applied to statutory language. Even if the crowd exceeded the capacity of the meeting location, a valid open meeting would still occur so long as the public body took steps to allow reasonable public access to persons wishing to attend the proceedings… Here, the Board conducted its meeting outside the County Courthouse to accommodate the great number of persons, which is a requirement of the Open Meeting Law….Thus, the Board’s decision to relocate the meeting to the Courthouse lawn was reasonable and did not require any formal action.”

Later in the memo, Hooge states, “Although the agenda stated that public comment would occur in the Commissioners room, the evidence suggests the Board did not intend to exclude wrongfully any member of the public from the meeting, nor did it intend to unreasonably limit public comment with the relocation. In fact, just the opposite occurred; the Board decided to move the meeting to the front lawn to accommodate reasonably all the members of the public attending the meeting.”

In conclusion, Hooge wrote, “The Lincoln County Board of Commissioners complied with the Open Meeting Law by providing reasonable accommodation to conduct its meeting...”