What are minutes?

Montana law requires that appropriate minutes of all meetings of the council that are required to be open to the public must be kept and made available for inspection by the public 2-3-212, MCA and 7-1-4141, MCA. Municipalities are also required to take minutes of closed meetings which are then sealed and secured to prevent compromising the right of privacy of any involved individual and released only by court order. The responsibility for recording, signing and preserving council minutes is a specific duty of the city or town clerk 7-4‐4501 and 7‐4‐4511, MCA. Except for the minutes of a public hearing, the minutes of a routine council meeting need not be verbatim record but must include 2-3-212, MCA:

1. The date, time and place of the meeting;

2. The names of the council members and the mayor in attendance;

3. The substance of all matters proposed, discussed or decided;

4. A record of each individual member’s vote on all matters that were voted upon. (See the model voting record for the clerk’s minutes attached at the end of this section.)

In short, the minutes of a routine council meeting should be a brief record of what happened (the proceedings) and not necessarily a record of what was said by council members. However, the exact language of any motion should be included in the minutes along with the name of the member who made the motion and the person who seconded the motion. The exact language of the motion should be read aloud by the clerk prior to taking the vote on the measure to ensure that all members understand the motion and that the clerk has correctly recorded it in the minutes. A few councils require that the clerk tape record the entire meeting and to retain these tapes for varying lengths of time. Except as a memory aid for the clerk in preparing the draft minutes, no useful purpose is served by taping a routine council meeting or retaining any tapes beyond the time the minutes are approved and there are compelling
reasons not to do so. If an audio recording of a meeting is made and the council designates the audio recording as the official record, a written record of the meeting must also be kept and shall include the same items aslisted in 2-3-212, MCA including a log or time stamp of each main agenda item to help the public reviewing the record find the information they need.
The clerk should provide a copy of the draft minutes to each council member for review prior to the next regular council meeting where they should be included on the agenda for possible correction and approval. Upon approval by the council, the minutes should be authenticated by the clerk’s signature and filed for permanent retention.