Commissioner, mayor spar over accuracy of meeting minutes  

Apopka City Clerk Susan Bone is developing a policy for City Council meeting minutes after Commissioner Nick Nesta and Mayor Bryan Nelson sparred over the accuracy of past meeting notes during last week’s meeting.  

At the meeting, the council discussed the possibility of Bone developing a policy, but commissioners did not vote on it. 

The City Council did vote 3-2 in opposition for the city attorney to draft a meeting minutes policy for later presentation to the Council. 

Nesta, who proposed the idea during his council report, said it would promote further transparency and accuracy about what was said and transpired at the meetings.  

Nesta and Commissioner Diane Velazquez voted in favor, while Nelson, Commissioner Nadia Anderson and Commissioner Alexander H. Smith opposed it.  

During his presentation, Nesta highlighted three instances where discrepancies occurred, all from the July 2 City Council meeting. Each involved residents commenting at the meeting.  

Nesta recommended a policy to ensure accuracy between what’s recorded on the City Council’s online livestreams and the minutes that the council approve.  

“I’m asking tonight that we instruct the city attorney, Cliff Shepard, to draft a policy for City Council approval that ensures this manipulation, distortion for political gain at the expense of the residents does not continue to occur in the future,” Nesta said.  

Nesta accused Mayor Bryan Nelson of pressuring City Clerk Susan Bone to make changes to the minutes. Nelson pushed back and said communication with Bone about the minutes is infrequent.  

During his mayor’s report, Nelson defended Bone and played a video featuring professional speaker and coach Susan Leahy describing the do’s and don’ts of transcribing minutes. The video is from her YouTube channel Robert’s Rules Made Simple, a company that offers training and courses breaking down Robert’s Rules of Order for conducting meetings.  

After playing the video, Nelson said Bone has been following proper procedure for recording minutes and is not engaging in the “don’ts” on the list. 

In an interview with The Apopka Chief on Tuesday, July 22, Nelson said he has not asked Bone to change meeting minutes in more than a year, when he said he last requested changes to misspelled names and grammatical errors.  

He defended his vote against Nesta’s proposal.  

“I don’t see any reason to change the policy to fit Commissioner Nesta’s narrative,” Nelson said.  

In a separate interview, Shepard said it would be unusual for a municipality to have a meeting minutes policy. 

 “Meeting minutes policy is not something that is standard,” Shepard said. “Some cities have something, others don’t. There are numerous ways that are potentially correct based on whatever the city desires to keep minutes.” 

Various types of meeting minutes exist, but there were three types Shepard highlighted: action minutes, verbatim minutes and summary minutes.  

Action minutes are records of motions, who made them, who seconded them and the vote, excluding discussions.  

Verbatim minutes try to capture every word spoken during the meeting, which, if taken during meetings that last several hours, could result in many pages of minutes, according to Shepard. 

“When they don’t get it exactly right, you have the issues that have come up here where somebody says, ‘I said something different,’ or ‘you didn’t catch the meaning of what I was trying to say,’ or whatever,” Shepard said.  

Summary minutes, which according to Shepard are a hybrid of action and verbatim minutes, give a high-level overview of the discussion and the decision made, but may not record all thoughts and ideas.  

“The summary is also a problem, at least potentially, because, again, in creating a summary that is somebody’s view of what the important stuff was, it may not capture, obviously, every thought that everybody had that spoke to the issue,” Shepard said. “And then you get people who will say, ‘Well, I said this, and that’s not in there. I express that thought, and that’s not in there.’”  

Shepard said that if he were asked for his suggestion on the matter, he would prefer simplifying to action minutes.  

“My recommendation is just to go with action minutes and let the tape of the meetings speak for itself as to who said what about what issue, as opposed to try to recast or summarize or paraphrase what everybody says,” he said.  

The legal purpose of minutes is to record the actions a voting body has taken, not the debates or the discussions leading up to the vote, Shepard said. However, it’s up to the body to decide how to record its minutes, he added.  

Nesta did not respond to requests for comment for this story.