On December 1, 2025, following the regular council meeting ("Council Recap: 2026 Bond Money for Streets"), the Richardson City Council adjourned and moved to a small conference room in the back of city hall and opened a special called meeting out of the camera's reach. There's no official video record of this meeting.
I was present (at least until the special meeting went into executive session to discuss candidates for quasi-judicial boards). Mine might be the only eyewitness account of this meeting by the Richardson City Council. I could have video recorded the public part of the meeting. The public interest would be better served by doing so, making all such council meetings accessible to everyone, even those who can't make it to meetings in person.
Boards and Commissions Process and Recording of Meetings
The first agenda item of the special meeting was to further discuss the boards and commission process and the recording of meetings.
After 40 minutes of discussion, the council agreed (again) on several things and asked City Manager Don Magner to research legal questions about a couple of things.
One thing agreed upon (again) is that there are no plans to video record any meetings that aren't already being video recorded. What the city council is adopting is a practice of making and keeping audio recordings of board and commission meetings. Audio, not video.
Why? The council wants meetings to be accessible by members of the public who cannot always attend in person. They also want to ensure the existence of an official record of meetings to counter any false reports of what happened, including the creation of fake recordings. Audio recording can meet these objectives very cost-effectively.
Aside: I found it ironic that the city council deliberated this without recording their own deliberations about the matter.
The council is requesting a legal opinion whether state law allows for executive sessions during board and commission meetings and what kinds of agenda items would fall under those exceptions to open meetings.
One exception the council is wants is for disciplinary hearings and proceedings. Those would not be recorded.
Another area left somewhat unresolved regarded applications for grants reviewed by the Cultural Arts Commission. All agreed that the applications should redact sensitive information, like Social Security or EIN numbers. Maybe even the whole application should be private unless a grant is awarded. Because the Cultural Arts Commission reviews the applications in meetings, can their deliberations be in executive session? Should they be? City Manager Magner will research the legality of this.
Appointments to Boards and Commissions
Done with deciding how board and commission meetings should be run, the council turned its attention to making 2026 appointments to current openings or anticipated openings on the non-quasi-judicial boards and commissions.
The council members did this in a neutral and objective manner, riffling through dozens of applications, calling out names of people who looked like good fits for certain boards and commissions. Council members were looking to find the right roles to slot people into, not to find reasons to reject them. None of the discussion seemed to be less than candid due to my presence.
For some positions, a need or desire to have balanced geographic assignments made some candidates unsuitable for some positions. In other cases, a candidate's own expressed preference for one position ruled them out for another position. In the end, the council ended up with more than a dozen candidates and made plans to schedule personal interviews. The interviews will be scheduled for December 8th and 15th at 5 pm, with the regular council meetings for those dates pushed back to either 7 or 7:30 pm. These meetings are open to the public if you are thinking about applying for future openings and want to see how the interview process is run, or if you are just curious about how city government is run. But you have to go in person. The meetings won't be recorded. :-(
After discussing all the non-quasi-judicial boards, the council moved into executive session to discuss appointments to the quasi-judicial boards (City Plan Commission, Civil Service Board, Dallas Area Rapid Transit Board, North Texas Municipal Water District Board, and Zoning Board of Adjustment/Building and Standards Commission). That means they held those discussions out of hearing by the public. Why? Perhaps there are some bigwigs among these appointees and deference must be paid.
"When 'how' is agreed,
the council moves on to "who".
New voices to choose."
—h/t ChatGPT
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