Behind Every Meeting

Most people probably have no clue what it is that the City Clerk does. The answer? Meeting prep, lots and lots of meeting prep!

Not only am I responsible for prepping for City Council meetings, but I’m also responsible for all the various committee and board meetings of the City. This includes publishing notice of the meeting, working closely with City staff to finalize the agenda, sending out the agenda packet, taking minutes, and then, after the meeting, finalizing and ensuring all the documentation is recorded for years to come.

For this blog, I’ll focus on a typical City Council meeting. 

Let’s start with the meeting notice. Each public body shall give reasonable advance publicized notice of the time and place of each meeting by a method designated by the public body and recorded in its minutes. Such notice shall be transmitted to all members of the public body and to the public (Neb.Rev.Stat 84-1411).  What exactly does this mean? 

The City of Beatrice has designated the Beatrice Daily Sun as our official publication for meeting notices. Typically, I try to schedule notices to be published up to five (5) days prior to the meeting; however, there may be times the publication deadline has passed, and for those unique instances, we use forty-eight (48) hours as reasonable advance publicized notice. 

Meeting notices can also be posted in three (3) conspicuous public places. For us, we use the City Hall Bulletin Board, City Auditorium Bulletin Board, and Beatrice Public Library Bulletin Board. We also publish a list of upcoming scheduled meetings on our website.

I work closely with the City Administrator and City Attorney while preparing the agenda.  Between meetings, I maintain a working Microsoft Word document that is updated, often multiple times a day, as emails and conversations take place, and previous agendas are reviewed to ensure nothing is overlooked. The deadline to submit an agenda item to my office is 5:00 p.m. on the Thursday prior to the meeting.

As we’re finalizing the agenda, I’m also gathering the supporting documentation to be included in the agenda packet. Typically, on Friday morning, I begin putting together the worksheet for the meeting. The worksheet acts as a sort of “cheat sheet” for the Mayor and Council to follow along during the meeting and provides suggested motions and other information. 

At this time, I also create the meeting template in SparqData, the cloud-based software the Mayor and Council use to access the agenda packet prior to the meeting. All supporting documentation and motions are also uploaded into SparqData, which is displayed during the meeting in the Board Room.

It’s at this time that resolutions and ordinances are given their numbers. To easily identify which resolution or ordinance, a fluid spreadsheet is used to track the next available number. Our resolutions are given continuous numbers, while our ordinances are numbered with the last two digits of the current year, followed by a hyphen and the next continuous number, i.e. 26-10.

After numbers have been assigned, the original resolution and/or ordinance is printed with its number and tabbed with a “sign here” sticker for the Mayor to sign. If the resolution or ordinance has an exhibit or corresponding information, I also attach that information to it at this time.

During the meeting, it is my job to take notes, or minutes. Minutes are not intended to be a transcription of the meeting, but rather a summary of the happenings of the conversations and actions during the meeting. As a Nebraska first-class city, minutes of the prior meeting are required to be published on the city’s website within ten (10) business days after the meeting.

Tuesdays, and often the next several l days, are spent finalizing the meeting. This includes publishing the official agenda packet on the City’s website, distributing and filing all adopted resolutions or ordinances to the correct parties, and ensuring they are also stored electronically in the City’s filing system for future reference. 

And just like that, the process starts all over again.

Erin Saathoff
City Clerk