From my friends at TCOG (Tennessee Coalition for Open Government)
The District Attorneys General Conference has been busy this year, pushing a bill to exempt many of its meetings from the Open Meetings Act. Just last week, the bill cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Now, perhaps we know why. The Comptroller’s Office today released an audit that showed that the DA’s Conference (made up entirely, of course, of lawyers) has been largely violating the open meeting law.
It hasn’t posted public notice of most of its meetings (see chart below) and failed to take minutes of many others.
Part of the answer, it seems, is the DA’s Conference bill HB49/SB245 that I’ve been puzzling about for weeks. This bill allows broad exemptions to the open meetings act (problem solved!) that go well beyond attorney-client privilege and include such vague descriptions such as “matters related to requests.”
The bill is up in the House Judiciary Committee Tomorrow, Wednesday March 26, 2025. READ BLOG POST of TCOG for more information.
