Lawsuit: Clairton illegally charged per minute fee for virtual city council meeting

Infighting over the potential sale of a community’s sewer system led to a lawsuit this week over the Sunshine Act, alleging that callers participating in a council meeting via conference call were required to pay a per-minute fee.

The lawsuit was filed by the Clairton Municipal Authority, along with two members of the board, James Cerqua and Doug Ozvath, against the City of Clairton, in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court.

It asks the court to declare the city’s actions in requiring payment to participate in a public meeting a violation of the state Sunshine Act, but also to void the vote taken over the sewer system issue.

But Clairton city manager and finance director Howard Bednar on Thursday called the lawsuit disingenuous. He said the allegations in the suit are untrue, and that neither the conference call service the city uses, nor the council, charged anyone anything.

Instead, he said the fees referenced in the suit are ones being charged by callers’ own phone service.

“If it’s your own phone service, we have no control over it,” Bednar said.

A call to the attorney who filed the suit has not been returned.

According to the lawsuit, city council limited in-person attendance at its Nov. 10 monthly meeting because of the covid-19 pandemic.

Council offered 16 tickets to members of the public to attend the meeting in person, the complaint said, and anyone else interested was told they could participate via conference call.

Bednar said that the city uses the program Free Conference Call to run its call, and there is not — and has never been — a charge.

The complaint, however, said there was a per-minute fee to call in, but does not specify what that amount was, or to whom it was paid.

In addition, the lawsuit also alleges that the call quality was poor, and multiple people objected during the meeting because they could not hear what was being said.

“Multiple public citizens expressed their inability to hear the discussions and deliberations during the meeting via the conference call line, and the defendant did not remedy this problem – but instead pushed a vote on this ordinance forward; fully knowing that it was a popular topic with varying disputed views,” the lawsuit said.

Bednar, who was in council chambers for the meeting, said he never heard anyone complain.

“Anybody that was on the phone was given the opportunity to be heard, and they were,” he said.

Council voted to approve the conveyance of the Clairton sewer system to the city, and to appoint RBC Capital as Sell-Side adviser to help evaluate the city’s options regarding the municipal authority, which was created in 1950.

“Simply put, the Sunshine Act does not permit any agency to charge residents to attend a public meeting,” the complaint said.

The lawsuit cited the Sunshine Act, which provides that “the right of the public to be present at all meetings of agencies… is vital to … the democratic process.”

Experts on Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Act said that charging anyone to attend a meeting in-person or in a conference call would be illegal.

“You might as well sell tickets to the people in the room,” said Erik Arneson, the executive director of Pennsylvania’s Office of Open Records. “It is exactly the same thing.”

The Sunshine Act gives the public the right to attend and participate in public meetings, Arneson said.

“Budgets are tight, I totally get that,” he said. “Giving public access to meetings is a foundational responsibility to public agencies.”

Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, said charging a fee for meeting access is directly in conflict with the law’s intent. It is the municipality’s cost to bear for the use of technology to host meetings, she said, which ultimately will get passed to the taxpayer.

“That’s so antithetical to what the Sunshine Act stands for,” she said.

When audio quality is poor, Arneson said, that is also problematic.

“You have to make sure the quality is good enough for the people using it to understand what’s going on.”

Since the pandemic, Arneson said, there has been an uptick in complaints about access to public meetings. But he also noted that more municipalities have called for advice on how to do it right.