Scottville City Commission Enters Closed Session Illegally, Violating Open Meetings Act

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On March 9th, 2026, a group of four Scottville City Commissioners took a vote that should never have happened.  A very experienced city manager was present, a city attorney from a respected law firm was present, and the aforementioned commissioners-- what was missing was three of their fellow commissioners.  

The minutes of the meeting reflect that Sue Evans was the only person who spoke duing public comment, and she commented about the number of absences that night.  This had our staff look at the roll call; sure enough, Commissioners Copenhaver, Spencer, and Duncan were absent, leaving only a scant quorum (4 of 7) available to conduct business.  This reporter remembered that the commission had planned to go into closed session in order to look at some unidentified legal opinion drafted by the city attorney.  The minutes showed that they went into that closed session after voting unanimously to do so:

The 48-minute escapade away from the public and into the review of a legal opinion may seem a legitimate use of the closed session, but it wasn't.  It's not that the minutes left off the matter of the legal opinion, this is definitely bad form for a city with a lot of history with violating the Open Meetings Act (OMA), but that omission isn't fatal, only very non-transparent. 

What was fatal was that there weren't enough commissioners present to go into closed session under section 8h of the OMA.  Section 7(1) of the OMA is explicit enough:

To have a 2/3 roll call vote of members elected or appointed and serving is required to go into closed session under section 8(h), and this includes absent commissioners as well according to every legal source and precedent:

Simply put, when you have a public body with seven members thereon, at least five need to vote to go into closed session to consult with their attorney.  When only four members are present, they have a quorum to conduct city business, but they can't lawfully go into closed session under section 8(h) or the similar purpose 8(e). 

This isn't rocket science.  The city attorney should have known that this wasn't a valid vote with only four commissioners in attendance, as should City Manager Clarence Goodlein and each and every one of the present commissioners, who should respect that going into closed session is not a privilege they can always invoke to get away from public scrutiny. 

Citizens of Scottville should be disgusted that their public servants broke the law in order to hide away some sort of legal deliberation that they couldn't even give their constituents a hint of what it was all about.  Breaking the law isn't a way to inspire trust among the people, especially when the public body couldn't even tell the citizenry why they needed to hold an illegal secret meeting in the first place. 

Unfortunately, the OMA doesn't give citizens much help in reigning in errant public bodies when the likely cause of the OMA violation can be blamed on pure ignorance of the law rather than a willful or intentional violation.  Yet, if any citizen breaks any law out of ignorance of the law, they face the consequences.

The same should apply to public servants who as a group fail to obey the law that applies to them.