Public and Media FAQs
The Open Meetings Law defines “public body”. The law says that public bodies that are part of State government have to file a schedule of regular meetings with us.
No, there is not a list. The reason is that the definition of “public body” is very broad.
The short answer is that the law requires you to send them to us. We can’t tell you exactly why the General Assembly said you have to file with us. One possibility is that people sometimes have trouble knowing where to look for government agencies on the Internet but know about the Secretary of State’s office.
No, the law has other requirements for local governments.
The individual agencies decide. They may consult their attorney or the Attorney General to help decide if notices have to be filed with us. For more information, you may find the helpful.
Some agencies choose to file notices of special or called meetings or public hearings with us.
No, we don’t have the authority to make an agency file regular meeting notices. You may want to contact the agency directly. You may also want to consult with an attorney.
We don’t have the authority to penalize an agency for not filing a meeting notice with us. For information on penalties read the Open Meetings Act. You may also find the Attorney General’s FAQs and Guide to Open Government helpful.
We don’t know. We set up the electronic calendar to include all of the agencies that filed meeting notices with us in calendar year 2014/2015. There may be other agencies that didn’t file notices during that time for some reason. For example, an agency may not have had a public meeting and so may not have filed a meeting notice. In addition, new agencies are often created by the General Assembly or by agencies themselves. For example, a principal department head might decide to create an advisory committee which would then need to file notices.
Agencies are only required to enter the information required by the Open Meetings Act . Our e-calendar has space for agencies to enter optional information but we can’t make them do that. There should be contact information for every meeting so you can call or email and ask questions about the meeting. DO NOT call or email the Secretary of State’s office to ask questions about a meeting. We will not know the answers. The only information we have about meetings is what you see on our website.
There are 2 places on the website with meeting notice information: the E-Calendar Some agencies filed meeting notices for year before the E-Calendar was on our website. We don’t have the staff to be able to go back and add the information about those meetings to our E-Calendar.
You can get more information about the Open Meetings Law from many different sources. For example, you can get information from the Attorney General's website.
There are websites outside of State government which are also possible sources for information about the Open Meetings Law. Please note that the websites listed below are not part of the Secretary of State’s office. We offer this information in an effort to be helpful.
* Public Records Law for North Carolina Local Governments by David Lawrence, is a book published by the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although the book mainly deals with Public Records Law and local government, it includes some information about State government and open meetings.
* The School of Government also has a blog, Coates Canons, which includes postings about the Open Meetings Law.