Marengo's Council Put Off a Required Review in 2023. It Didn't Come Back to It Until This Month.

The last thing the Marengo City Council did on Monday, August 10, after the department reports and after its own closed session, was adopt a resolution without a word of discussion. The vote was unanimous, and with it thirty-one sets of the city's closed-door minutes, going back to May 2023, stopped being secret.

It looked like housekeeping. Under the Open Meetings Act it was closer to a deadline the city had been missing for nearly three years.

The Act tells public bodies to re-read their own closed-session minutes on a clock. Reviews "shall occur every 6 months, or as soon thereafter as is practicable, taking into account the nature and meeting schedule of the public body." That allowance is measured against how often a body meets, and this one meets about two dozen times a year. More than sixty council meetings came and went between the point the review fell due and the night the council caught up. As far as the council's own minutes show, the last review Marengo actually completed was in March 2023, which is also the last time it released any closed-session minutes. The resolution worked through a backlog of thirty-seven closed sessions in a single motion.

Why the Law Makes Them Look Back

The Open Meetings Act lets a council close its doors only for reasons it names, and it names a great many of them, close to forty, most of which no city council will ever touch. The ones Marengo uses are the familiar ones: pending or probable litigation, the performance or discipline of specific employees, buying or leasing real property, setting a price to sell city property, filling a vacant office. One of the exemptions is discussing closed-session minutes, and it was one of the two the council used that night before it came back out and adopted the resolution. The other, in the city's own words on the agenda that night, was potential litigation.

Getting behind the door takes a public step first. A council votes to close while it is still in open session, each member's vote and the exemption being claimed have to be announced at the time, and both go into that meeting's minutes. The closing itself is a matter of public record even when what follows is not.

What the Act does not do is treat that secrecy as permanent. Minutes have to be kept, for closed meetings as much as open ones. A verbatim recording has to run. And on that six-month clock, the council has to re-read those minutes and report, in public, whether the reason for keeping them closed still holds.

The logic is that the reasons expire. A lawsuit ends. A hire is made. A land deal closes or falls through. When the reason is gone, the record is supposed to come out. The review is the mechanism that makes a closed session a delay in the public record rather than a permanent hole in it.

A few things worth knowing when you hear the phrase. The council cannot take a final vote behind closed doors, and before it votes it has to say out loud what it is voting on, in enough detail to tell the room what business is being conducted. A contract the council has to approve gets approved by a public vote, even when the negotiating happened behind the door. And separately from the Open Meetings Act, the state's public records law makes the records behind the city's spending available on request, subject to that law's own exemptions, whatever room the discussion happened in. Marengo's practice of putting an itemized list of its bills on every agenda goes further than the law obliges it to. The decisions land in public even when the discussion does not.

What the Record Shows

Marengo Weekly keeps an archive of city council minutes going back to 2009, and the surprise in it was not that the city fell behind. It is how well the system worked before it did.

The council has been doing these reviews for as long as our archive runs. A July 2009 meeting recessed for what the minutes call a "six month audit of minutes"; from 2013 the clerk began logging them under the statute's own name, and they appear roughly twice a year through October 2023.

Releases were close to an annual habit. We count thirteen separate votes to release closed-session minutes between 2009 and March 2023, including nine sets of 2008 minutes opened in January 2009, seven sets in December 2011, twenty-one sets in August 2015, four sets in August 2016, five sets in February 2018, and in January 2020 a single batch of fifty-five sets reaching back nearly a decade.

The council also said no on the record, more than once, which is the same system working. In September 2022 it reviewed its minutes and recommended releasing none of them. In August 2020 it held everything on the city attorney's advice with litigation pending.

Then the rhythm stopped. A release and a review in March 2023 are the last of each the minutes record as finished. An October 2023 meeting took the review up and did not complete it. Nothing at all shows up in 2024, in 2025, or in the first half of 2026. The August 10 resolution, taking thirty-seven sets in one pass, was the catch-up.

That October session is the one worth pausing on, because the minutes released this month say what happened in the council's own words. The closed-session minutes of that night list it as one of three items the council took up, and record it this way: "Semi-annual review of minutes of Executive Session as required by section 2.06 of the Open Meetings Act pursuant to 5 ILCS '120/2 (c) (21) will be held until the next review." The council went behind the door, put the review off, and came back out. That is why the open minutes for the same meeting carry a line reading "Possible action on matters discussed in Executive Session," with nothing under it, before the meeting adjourned at 9:11.

Two records of the same night, one public and one not, showing the same thing. The determination the Act asks for has to be reported in open session, so the closed minutes would not settle it on their own. It is the two together that do. A search of all thirty-one released sets turns up no other mention of the semi-annual review anywhere between May 2023 and May 2026, and six sessions remain sealed, so that is an absence in the released record rather than in the whole of it.

Which moves the endpoint. The last review Marengo completed was in March 2023. The next one came due six months after that, and the council adopted this resolution two years and ten months later.

Three things are worth knowing before anyone reaches for a motive. The city clerk who had been scheduling these reviews, and who announced the March 2023 one from the clerk's chair, left the office that April, a month before the earliest session on the resolution's list. Four people have held the administrator's job since, two of them on an interim basis, and there have been two mayors. And of the eight council members who voted that night, three took office after the reviews had already stopped, one of them four weeks before the vote.

We asked the city who is supposed to put the review on the calendar, because the Act creates the duty without saying who inside a city holds it. City Administrator Derik Morefield, who started in March 2025, about two years into the lapse, answered that the job does not sit in one place. The city clerk, an elected position, "is technically responsible for compliance with this OMA issue," he wrote, but "the position does not pay much and so in the past and most recently, the City has not paid enough attention to this requirement." His answer put the responsibility "somewhere between the City Clerk, City administrator and City attorney." He added that the city has looked into converting the clerk's job from elected to appointed, which would take a referendum.

That is about as direct an account of how a recurring deadline goes unmet as a city is likely to give. The duty was real, it was assigned to an elected office rather than a hired one, an office the administrator says does not pay much, and no one else picked it up.

The Act anticipates a body falling behind, up to a point. Falling behind does not by itself make the minutes public in an ordinary court case, and the same protection covers the verbatim recordings, so long as the body, within 60 days of discovering the lapse, reviews the minutes and reports its determination in open session. It is worth saying plainly that the Act sets no fine and no automatic penalty for a missed review. In setting out that 60-day cure, the Act describes what was missed as a "technical" requirement.

The timing is what matters there. A city that noticed the problem in June and fixed it in August has done close to what the Act asks.

So we asked, twice, when Marengo first identified that the reviews had stopped.

The city routed the question to its lawyer. David W. McArdle, of Zukowski, Rogers, Flood & McArdle in Crystal Lake, wrote back on Monday, August 17, and said Morefield had asked him to address it. He did not give a date. The exact one, he said, is "difficult to determine." What he gave instead was this: "Personally, I have been aware for more than a year that the process needed to be addressed."

The rest of his answer described a city short on capacity. Marengo "operates with limited staffing," he wrote. The backlog grew, and some of what the council discussed behind closed doors was complicated enough to slow the work of "reviewing, editing, approving, and releasing the minutes."

His last sentence was not an answer to our question.

"We really have no legal defense to the mandate required under the OMA law."

The 60 days runs from discovery, and nobody has put a date on discovery. The city's own lawyer has said he knew for more than a year that the process needed addressing.

What Opened, and What Stayed Closed

Of the thirty-seven sets the council reviewed under Resolution 26-8-A, running from May 22, 2023 to May 26, 2026, thirty-one were released. Six stay confidential: a July 2023 litigation session, a December 2024 session on land acquisition and litigation, and four litigation sessions from 2025.

The resolution does not say why those six stay closed. It records only that on the city attorney's advice they "must remain confidential and not released at this time." All six are litigation matters, and "at this time" leaves the door open to a later release.

By the resolution's own labels, personnel was cited in eighteen of the thirty-seven, litigation in seventeen, land acquisition in three, the sale of city property in two, and a lease in one. Some sessions carry two reasons. Those labels are the city's, and they are not always reliable: on several dates the reason printed in the resolution does not match the exemption the council cited from the dais that night, and one session is described two different ways within the resolution itself.

The council went into closed session on March 25, 2024, on a personnel matter, according to that meeting's minutes. That date appears nowhere in the resolution: not released, not held back, not listed as reviewed. Asked about it, Deputy Clerk Marcia Pal, who is also the city's freedom of information officer, told Marengo Weekly the session "should have been listed in Section 2 as remaining confidential at this time." Section 2 is the resolution's list of the sets that stay closed. So by the city's own account the resolution the council adopted is at least one session short, and the March 2024 minutes stay shut.

Our own check of the council's minutes found two more. On June 12, 2023 the council voted to close its doors at 7:45 in the evening, under the exemptions for pending litigation and for personnel, and reconvened at 8:10. That date falls inside the span the resolution set for itself, and it appears nowhere in the document, in either section. A second closed session, on April 24, 2023, falls a month before that span opens but inside the same stretch that had gone unreviewed since March 2023. Counting only what the resolution set out to cover, it should have accounted for thirty-nine closed meetings rather than thirty-seven. We put the March 2024 session to the city and it answered. We have not put the other two dates to it.

The resolution also authorized destroying the verbatim recordings of closed sessions more than 18 months old, except for the six still sealed. This is ordinary and it is what the statute contemplates: 18 months is the floor the Act sets, and the council did the same thing in March 2023. It is worth being precise about what the recordings are, because they are easy to mistake for the record. A recording does not become public when the minutes of the same session are released. It stays confidential unless the council separately determines that it no longer needs to be, and the resolution made no such determination. Sitting elected officials can listen to one at City Hall, as can an appointed official filling the vacancy of an elected office; the public cannot, unless the council consents to its disclosure. Its function is to exist as something a judge could listen to if someone alleged the written minutes were wrong. The Act permits destroying one only after the council approves both the destruction of that particular recording and minutes of that meeting that meet the Act's content requirements. The minutes are the permanent record; the recording is the backstop behind it.

One practical note: released minutes do not get posted to the city's website automatically. They become records available on request. Marengo Weekly asked the city for all thirty-one sets, and the clerk's office produced them on August 14. We have published all thirty-one.

How Often the Doors Close, and for What

Closed sessions are a routine part of doing city business, in Marengo and everywhere else. Across our archive they appear in about half of council meetings, based on the meetings digitized as of August 2026. The share swings widely from one year to the next, running above eight meetings in ten in 2022 and closer to a third in the lightest years, with no steady direction to it.

The sessions themselves vary. A personnel session in December 2023 ran nearly two hours, from 8:14 to 10:13 at night.

One sequence shows the exemption working as designed. At the June 8, 2026 meeting the mayor told the council, in open session, that four candidates for the Ward 3 vacancy would be discussed at the next meeting behind closed doors. On June 22 that session happened, under the provision covering the filling of a public office. On July 13, in open session, the council consented to the mayor's appointment of Ryan Mueller to the seat. The deliberation was private, the decision was public, and the public was told in advance that it was coming.

Read Them Yourself

Minutes are an index, not a payload. The Act requires closed-session minutes to carry a summary of what was discussed and not merely a record of any votes, which means a set of bare tallies would be its own finding. There is a wrinkle there worth holding onto: a council may only authorize destroying a recording after approving minutes that meet that content standard, so in adopting it the council has effectively certified these minutes clear it.

So rather than ask you to take our account of what is in them, we have published the minutes themselves. All thirty-one sets are here, as the council released them. We have removed a small number of personal names, and that page says exactly which kinds and why. We have not removed the name of any elected official, or of any staff member, attorney or contractor acting in their official role. The city produced these to us without redactions, and it will produce them to anyone else who asks.