Ojai City Council Regular Meeting

participating remotely and provided the address of her remote location for inclusion on the agenda. I acknowledged the receipt of that information and indicated that I would take care of the agenda inclusion and remote meeting setup. I failed to ensure that the remote location was included on the posting of this agenda, as required for her participation from that remote location. I discovered the omission this morning while completing preparations for tonight's meeting and notified staff. Councilmember Lange will not be able to participate tonight in this agenda as council member and take part in voting because of this error.

I want to be clear that this was an administrative error within the City Clerk's Office. This same error occurred over a year ago. At that time, City Manager Harvey had worked with me to establish additional procedures and checklists within the City Clerk's Office which I am thankful for. Specifically intended to strengthen agenda preparation and prevent omissions like this of this nature. City Manager Harvey considered these improvements completed and in practice, and I failed to correctly follow procedure here.

Those procedures were available to me and responsibility for ensuring that this information appeared on the agenda rested solely with me as your Chief Deputy City Clerk. Going forward, I'm going to add separate verification steps for remote participation requests so that any remote location and all associated participation requirements are independently confirmed against final posted agenda or publication.

I run two separate checklists to document every meeting in action of our legislative body along with many logs and team meetings and things of that sort, an agenda posting checklist and a meeting follow-up checklist. I will also review the existing Checklist and posting process with the city manager and city attorney, and make any additional procedural changes necessary. Also I would appreciate any input from you as council members on your user experience with me and the office because we can so I may better improve things.

Following the consultation with the City Manager and City Attorney this morning, staff is recommending that the Council continue an entire regular meeting agenda which is the severity of this. And we're lucky because we have the September 15th special meeting already scheduled and confirmed by yourself as the City Council. This recommendation will be addressed tonight after my verbose explanation here.

I recognize the significance of this error. Agenda preparation and Brown Act compliance are co-responsibilities of the City Clerk's Office, and an omission affecting a Councilmember's ability to participate is particularly serious. I apologize to Councilmember Lange, the full council, city staff, and the public for the disruption this has caused. I take responsibility for this error and do appreciate the Council's time reviewing this as we address tonight's meeting appropriately after this. So next step, staff will be recommending that the September 8th meeting agenda be continued in its entirety to the September 22nd date with the caveat that the public hearing...

September 15th right?

Excuse me. With the exception of the El Roblar item. Yes, 15. Okay. September 15. The El Roblar Spa item and public hearing will not be continued to the 15th as it requires public noticing and rescheduling prior to another agenda. City staff today has spoken with El Roblar and the item is currently scheduled for September 22nd, and we will complete the noticing properly and we hope that this information is helpful and informative to the public who is very interested in the item and for you as Council.

And that is all, and I would appreciate any input you do have. And I'm ready to answer any questions.

I just want to say thank you for doing that. I know when anybody myself, when I make an error or whatever, to cop to it and admit to it is huge. So thank you for that. I was speaking with Cleary at the bar. So thank you, Wesleyan. Thanks.

Ditto on that. Appreciate the candid

discussion. The other thing I would note is that we learned a few minutes ago that there's an issue with Zoom. So even if this had not occurred, we would be prevented under the Brown Act from continuing the discussion for at least an hour But since we're continuing the entirety of the meeting a future meeting

wonderful Thank you, sir, and I appreciate how thoroughly explained What happened what you're doing?

Absolutely.

Thank You thank you So with that we've heard the recommendation It'd be great to do have a vote that so we would proceed with this agenda to 915 with the exception Of the public hearing which will move to 922

So because of the zoom outage, we actually cannot take a vote. OK? But so we can't take we have to suspend the meeting itself. So but I think what it says is that Under the Brown Act, if a disruption occurs that prevents members of the public from attending or observing the meeting via the two-way telephonic service or audiovisual platform during the meeting we can recess the open session of the meeting for at least one hour.

I think in this case we should just move forward with recessing the meeting until next week's

special meeting. Agreed any objection? Okay Great meeting. Meeting adjourned. Are we okay saying meeting adjourned? Okay!