Opinion: When a committee isn’t a ‘committee’
Based on the Boulder City Council’s discussion last Tuesday night, the answer is — whenever the council decides it isn’t. To understand why this is important, some background is necessary: Boulder has very stringent open meeting laws. Charter Section 9 provides the primary directive, “All meetings of the council or committees thereof shall be public.” So, unlike under state law, the council cannot hold executive (closed-door) sessions for any reason. The citizens temporarily granted executive session power in 2014 for the Xcel negotiations occurring then. But it was abused, and in 2017, the citizens rejected the council’s request to extend that power. Section 9 also contains the only exception to Boulder’s requirement that all committee meetings be public. It allows a committee of not more than two council members and any number of noncouncil members to meet privately to screen applications for city manager, city attorney and municipal court judge; to evaluate their performance, an