***Editor’s note: The Oswegonian retained independent editor Todd R. McAdam from the Cortland Standard (Cortland, New York) to oversee this piece to avoid a potential conflict of interest.***

The SUNY Oswego Student Association possibly violated the law last month when it gave only a few hours’ notice of a meeting, then blocked dozens of people from attending it, open government advocates said.

All meetings since April 22 have violated the Open Meetings Law, as every meeting has dealt with legislation that affects SUNY Oswego students, as well as the distribution of funds in a meeting that requires quorum, according to Kristin O’Neill, the assistant director for the New York State Committee on Open Government, the state’s top open-government advocates.

“If this is a meeting of at least a quorum of the university’s student governing body, for the purpose of conducting governing body business, it is my opinion that the meeting must be held in compliance with [Open Meetings Law],” O’Neill said. “This includes making the meeting open to all members of the public who wish to attend, not just individuals with university-issued email accounts.”

The violation followed an SA meeting April 20 that had more than 120 attendees, including students, alumni, college employees, media and the public, at which a couple people in the Zoom audience yelled out racial slurs, obscenities and other insults toward speakers and SA leaders. Following a 20-minute recess, SA Vice President Asheem Calixte suspended the rest of the meeting.

“Senate will be canceled for today due to comments made by people,” Calixte wrote in a message over the Zoom call. “If you are interested in joining the next senate meeting please look [for] an email and announcement on the Student Association social media page.”

The Oswegonian, WNYO 88.9 FM and WTOP-10 TV protested both the handling of the second meeting, as well as the original lack of budget council hearings prior to April 20’s meeting. 

In the last few years, SA has hosted budget council meetings with SA-funded organizations to discuss why a certain organization needed an exact amount of money for the following year. 

A timeline of when proposed budgets are due along with when budget council meetings should be is located in the official documents of SA on LakerLife. The Current Director of Finance, Trentin Carentz, told the three media organizations that he elected not to host budget council meetings because it was not in the bylaws and did not feel he needed more information, despite there being a precedent.

In a different statement from SA leadership, it said, “The Budget Council does not meet with clubs prior to their deliberations to avoid biases, this explains why the budget council did not meet with the media organizations or any other organization.” However, Ryan Green, who was the director of finance during the 2019-2020 academic year, said this was incorrect.

“We heard from many organizations about their budget request, responded to emails from the concerned and did our very best to do good by our students and their needs. To my knowledge, the [director of finance] two years prior, Miranda [Kryskow], gave that same exact courtesy to everyone,” Green said. “We disclosed the budget to all organizations before having [the] senate approve the budget or even speak on it. This was to ensure the process that we have in place was being utilized to its fullest by the students.”

The latter portion of the protest involved how the April 22 meeting — and all future meetings at that — was conducted and announced. SA stated that the April 22 meeting would have a link that required “internal users” to register for and would be sent out by email and put on SA’s Instagram page.

The announcement for that next meeting came late on April 21, for a meeting on April 22, announced only after a student with WNYO found a link on the Student Association’s external website. 

An email announcement of the meeting was not issued until 8:12 a.m. April 22, under 10 hours before the meeting. People who lacked an active Oswego.edu email address were not able to sign up to virtually attend. The email cited “security reasons” for locking out the public, non-student media and alumni.

The meeting violated two tenants of New York’s Open Meetings Law, said O’Neill and Paul Wolf, president of the New York Coalition for Open Government. Both of them added:

• State law requires public notice of at least one week before the meeting, either electronically or transmitted to news media and conspicuously posted in one or more public locations at least 72 hours before the meeting.

• The general public cannot be blocked from a public meeting, except for one of several specific exceptions that require an executive session.

SUNY Oswego SA President Lizeth Ortega-Ramirez said the organization has been advised by legal counsel not to comment until more information about Open Meetings Law and any potential violations comes to light.

“SA is still waiting on legal counsel on this matter,” Ortega-Ramirez said.

SA’s attorney, Kristin Shanley, did not return an email seeking comment.

“We do have a commitment to clarifying this situation … This will be done through a public statement from SA leadership,” Ortega-Ramirez said.

Wolf also cited the Student Press Law Center’s (SPLC) overview of New York’s Open Meeting Laws as it applies to student government organizations.  “A court would likely agree that student governments must comply with open-government laws” because the Student Association would be considered a public body.

“The law defines ‘public body’ as any entity for which a quorum is required to conduct public business that performs a government function for the state, agency or department of the state, including a committee or subcommittee of such public bodies,” SPLC’s overview states. “Moreover, New York’s Committee on Open Government … said in advisory opinion that because student governments determine the manner in which mandatory student fees are distributed, conduct public business and perform a governmental function on behalf of their school, they are therefore public bodies with the scope of the Open Meetings Law.”

This is not the first time that the Committee on Open Government has issued an opinion on a SUNY school’s student association. In 2018, the student Senate at the University at Buffalo failed to notify the university’s independent newspaper, The Spectrum, about an upcoming meeting. And in 1996, it issued an opinion regarding Brockport State’s student government. Then-Executive Director Robert Freeman said in 2018 that because the student Senate allocates student activity fees, it must comply with open meetings law.

“The law requires that notice be given to the news media, posted in one or more designated conspicuous public locations and, when possible, notice is supposed to be given on the entity’s website,” Freeman said then. “It doesn’t matter if it’s precedent, what does matter is what the law requires.”

Photo by Ben Grieco | The Oswegonian