Supreme Court spikes an excuse for hiding public comment

Yahoo

20-05-2025

The Iowa Supreme Court chamber in the Iowa Judicial Building on Feb. 22, 2023. (Photo by Kathie Obradovich/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
The Iowa Supreme Court gave citizen engagement and accessibility to public meetings a much-needed boost Friday in an appeal of a lawsuit against the Iowa City Community School District.
The district's practice of posting full videos of school board meetings on the internet for on-demand public viewing was at the heart of the case.
Government officials, staffs of statewide organizations of cities, counties and school boards, and access advocates like the Iowa Freedom of Information Council had awaited the decision with some trepidation. They worried the court might impose liability for statements expressed during public comment portions of governmental meetings and for their republication via internet posting of meeting recordings on government web sites or YouTube.
But the justices unanimously upheld lower court decisions dismissing the claims by Amie Villarini, the former girls' tennis coach at Iowa City West High School.
The Supreme Court ruling should curtail a recent practice by an increasing number of public officials who advocated that the risk of defamation lawsuits made it necessary for city councils and school boards to omit or limit public comment periods during their meetings, to warn speakers in advance about what they could and could not say, and even to remove or arrest speakers who made crude or demeaning comments.
The court decision takes away any rational basis for a governmental body to claim it should not archive recordings of meetings for later public viewing.
The Iowa City case arose because the school district is among the governmental bodies that did not cower to pressure to limit members of the public from speaking their minds, lodging complaints, or heaping praise during meetings. The district also did not give in to pressure to closet away video recordings of meetings that captured those comments.
Villarini's lawsuit in effect challenged both practices. She sued over statements by two former West High School tennis players who spoke freely during the public-comment time at a 2022 school board meeting.
The students expressed disappointment with the results of an internal school investigation of allegations of mistreatment involving the tennis coach, whom the girls did not identify by name. One girl told the board she believed the investigation protected the coach, not students. The other girl asked the board to change the district's investigation procedures to protect students better.
Board members did not respond to the girls' statements. The following day, the district placed Villarini on paid leave for the remainder of her one-year contract. The deputy superintendent said school staff learned after the meeting Villarini had posted comments the administrator described as unprofessional and disrespectful to students.
In keeping with its custom, the district posted a complete, unaltered video recording of the school board meeting on its YouTube channel two days after the meeting. The district refused multiple requests from Villarini and her lawyer to take the video down.
She sued, alleging the district defamed her by republishing what she called 'slanderous' statements by the two girls. The district defended the case, in part arguing that posting unaltered video of a public meeting of a governmental body constituted privileged speech.
The Supreme Court agreed. Chief Justice Susan Christensen wrote in the decision:
'The fair-report privilege protects the publication of defamatory matter concerning another in a report of an official action or proceeding or of a meeting open to the public that deals with a matter of public concern … if the report is accurate and complete or a fair abridgement of the occurrence reported.'
The court continued: 'Although we are fully articulating this privilege for the first time, we have recognized a version of it since the early 1900s. At the time, the privilege only covered judicial proceedings and could be defeated by a showing of malice. … Here, we are expanding the privilege and updating it so that it covers the report of more proceedings and is defeated by inaccuracy instead of malice.'
The court said it may have reached a different conclusion had the district edited the meeting recording. Yet, the court reiterated the importance of supporting steps that increase public access to governmental meetings.
'The application of the fair-report privilege to this case furthers Iowa's open-meeting laws. … Government entities, including school boards, must prioritize the accessibility of public meetings,' the court wrote.
'ICCSD [Iowa City Community School District] has chosen to comply with these laws with the most transparency possible, and that should not be punished. The fair-report privilege protects those government bodies that provide the public with a full account of their meetings.'
Thankfully, the Supreme Court did not mince words when it ratified that comments at a public meeting are privileged communications and that posting recordings of those comments is protected so long as the posted version is unaltered.
This common sense support of citizen participation in and access to governments continues Iowa's history of openness and its protection of free speech, while adapting state law to current realities.
Letting people watch live-streamed governmental board meetings and archived recordings of past meetings from their homes, offices — or even their tractor cabs — is a positive result from the Covid pandemic, when many people avoided large gatherings.
Citizens without transportation, parents with children at home, the elderly, or people away from home learned to use Zoom or YouTube to watch their school boards and city council meetings when they could and from remote locations.
By applying the fair-report privilege to meetings live-streamed or archived on the internet, even when they contain untoward comments, our Supreme Court has modernized an important protection for expressive rights of Iowans and articulated how the distribution of full-length recordings of meetings promotes government transparency.
With this Supreme Court endorsement, city councils, school boards and county boards of supervisors that persist in opening their meetings only to in-person attendees serve only themselves, not the public. Even more, the court's decision strips away a convenient but now dispelled legal excuse for elected officials to avoid doing the right thing.
Randy Evans is a member of the Iowa Writers' Collaborative and his columns may be found on his blog, Stray Thoughts.
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