Did Scottville Pass a Motion that Intentionally Violates the Open Meetings Act?

[XLFD]

I accidentally caught the latest headline on the Friday edition of the City of Ludington Daily News (COLDNews) after making a purchase at a local business.  While I hadn't attended the last Scottville City Commission (SCC) meeting, held at the same time as Ludington's so as to inhibit attendance thereat, they apparently added an action to the agenda at the very last minute, then passed it without any discussion.  At least this was what the headline and subheading indicated:

It clearly says the SCC "wants to ensure people who comment are within city limits" by requiring a full home address.  Now had our informed readers just read those boldfaced headlines, they would surely have wondered whether the SCC had the power to do such a thing under the Michigan Open Meetings Act (OMA).  They do not; a public body does not have the power to restrict any person from addressing the body just because they are not under that body's jurisdiction.  It's right there in MCL 15.263(5), and if you still won't believe it until you see a law firm's power point presentation on it:

  (see Open Meetings Act, RSJA Law Firm)

That last bullet point shows that any public official enforcing such a policy would effectively be intentionally violating the OMA and liable for criminal and civil penalties, that is correct:

However, once you read the article itself, it appears that this isn't what the SCC did in reality.  The simple motion initiated by Bobbiann Wallager seems to have just set a requirement for those who comment to state their home address, nothing more than that. 

While I have asked for clarification from the COLDNews as to whether the headline of the article is the truth, I have received nothing in two days and thus will assume that the article drafted by the attending reporter is correct and that the headline, likely fabricated by Hoosier COLDNews editor Lois Tomaszewski, is wrong.  Just like she was earlier this year when she told us 'water main crisis averted' when the article by the same author clearly showed it was a sewer force main, and still a crisis.

Tomaszewski's goal at that point appeared to be minimizing the environmental impact of the bypass pumping that occurred so as to not make the City of Ludington look so bad.  Here, her goal appears to be to suppress outside public comment for the SCC by making it seem as if Scottville business owners and others who have an interest in Scottville but don't live there will have no say at future SCC meetings. 

If her errors didn't coincide with the goals of the municipality (and the SCC have showed much contempt for outside voices over the last five years), one could write them off as just incompetence, rather than being just a shill for the area's corrupted municipal governments.  Even so, we should not easily forgive a city commission that would make a person divulge his home address just in order to address them, as many people will choose not to speak if this bit of personal information is divulged, information that is even immune for FOIA requests.