Changes to the Kansas Open Meetings Act (KOMA) go into effect on July 1. The Kansas Legislature this session passed HB 2134.
One change in the law states:
A public body or agency that voluntarily elects to live stream their meeting on television, the internet or any other medium shall ensure that all aspects of the open meeting are available through the selected medium for the public to observe. An unintentional technological failure or an action taken by the provider of the selected medium that disrupts or prevents such live stream shall not constitute a violation of this subsection.
There is no law that requires public bodies to live stream or record their meetings, however. And the law does not prohibit someone from the public recording or sharing all or part of an open meeting. As Great Bend USD 428 Superintendent Khris Thexton told the school board this week, “Somebody could come in and live stream your meeting, and that is allowed.”
So far as we know, this change won’t affect any of the meetings going on at this time in Barton County. The City of Great Bend live streams its meetings on Facebook and the Barton County Commission live streams them on MicroSoft Teams. Recordings of the meetings are available after the fact, at least for a time.
Barton Community College has people who attend and/or view the Board of Trustees meetings live via Zoom, but does not record the meetings.
The change has prompted the City of Lawrence to stop live steaming its City Council meetings on the City’s YouTube Channel, although it will continue to record them and post them on YouTube the next day whenever practicable. The reason for the change is that, under that city’s current procedures, the general public comment period is not live streamed. According to the Lawrence Journal World, city commissioners decided to stop broadcasting the general comments on YouTube last year because they felt some people used the time to be “performative,” rather than to actually speak to the commission.
Another change in the Kansas Open Meetings Act could have more of an effect locally. It states:
When a subcommittee or other subordinate group is created by a public body or agency, whenever a majority of such subcommittee or other subordinate group meets, such subcommittee or other subordinate group shall be subject to the requirements of this act.
In this case, Thexton said it isn’t clear how the legislation will work in real time. USD 428’s seven-member school board needs four members present at a meeting to conduct business. That hasn’t changed. “With this (legislation), it states that any subcommittee that is created by the school board will now be subject to the Open Meetings Act. So if the board creates a committee to look at the Hall of Fame – if you have a member that’s on the Hall of Fame group – that becomes a meeting.” The subcommittee would have to follow the same KOMA rules that the school board follows, announcing meetings in advance and making agendas available for these open meetings.
One way to get around that is to have administrative-appointed committees instead of board-appointed committees. But why would anyone want to circumvent open meetings?
In the case of the school board, Thexton regularly reports on legislative updates and the Kansas Association of School Boards recommends policy changes based on new legislation. He was just reporting the news, while not yet knowing how it will affect the school board.
“The attorneys for KASB are trying to look into what the actual statute says,” Thexton said. Usually after a statute goes into effect there’s a year of trying to figure it out and making adjustments as needed, he concluded.
The KOMA was also changed to clarify that fees for copies of public records should be “reasonable.” They can cover the entity’s cost in providing them, including the cost of labor. They aren’t intended to be prohibitive.
What about the legislature?
Over at the Capitol, Kansas Legislators started using a loophole in the Kansas Open Meetings Act this year to conduct business in secret caucus meetings, upending long-standing tradition but not violating the law. Do the changes fix that?
Sec. 5. K.S.A. 75-4318 is hereby amended to read as follows: 75- 4318. (a) Subject to the provisions of subsection (g), all meetings for the conduct of the affairs of, and the transaction of business by, all legislative and administrative bodies and agencies of the state and political and taxing subdivisions thereof, including boards, commissions, authorities, councils, committees, subcommittees and other subordinate groups thereof, receiving or expending and supported in whole or in part by public funds shall be open to the public and no binding action by such public bodies or agencies shall be by secret ballot.
The Kansas Open Meetings Act is one of our best laws, along with the Kansas Open Records Act. We all have a right to know how decisions are being made. If decisions by governing bodies are made in secret, only to be rubber-stamped in “public” meetings, then we are simply being told what to do. We hope any changes in this law serve to spread more light on government and not the opposite. While there may be more subcommittees in this world than anyone cares to know about, they are there for a purpose and what they do matters.
Susan Thacker adds:
This page is being updated on June 11 to include the following addition (not in the Great Bend Tribune print version).
I asked Clay Wirestone at the Kansas Reflector if this change in the law will affect the legislative loophole he wrote about earlier this year. (See https://kansasreflector.com/2025/03/24/kansas-house-gop-has-gathered-secretly-throughout-2025-session-doing-peoples-business-in-the-dark/) His response: "Unfortunately, KOMA is written so that the Legislature can exempt itself from any or all provisions by passing whatever rules it likes at the start of a session. In other words, they have a prime loophole that they can employ whenever they like."
