A.G. Gancarski
Closing out his tenure as the City of Jacksonville’s Inspector General, Thomas Cline issued his final report about alleged Sunshine Law issues with the city council.
Cline’s verdict: There were none.
Ordinance code requires an audit of Sunshine Law procedures with the council every two years and Cline fulfilled that task, reviewing public notices, minutes, and “continuing education” on compliance with Florida’s open government law.
The Inspector General reviewed a random sample of 283 of the 1,206 public notice meetings, and 128 “member-to-member” public notice meetings.
Non-compliance with Sunshine provisions, wrote Cline, was under the 5 percent margin of error.
Attendance sign-in sheets, however, were not consistently maintained or scanned into the database. And there are also issues processing approved excused absences.
For practical purposes, excused absences likely will become more of a burden for committee chairs than they were before. And there will be a renewed superficial zeal for sign-in sheet maintenance at meetings.
