You don’t need permission to record public meetings, despite what Milesburg Borough says

At the top of recent Milesburg Borough Council meeting agendas, one unusual piece of information has raised questions about potential violations of Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Act.

In a paragraph describing the public comment procedures, the following is included: “Electronic recording of the meeting cannot be done without making the council aware of it.”

At a meeting earlier this month, two residents requested permission to record and were given approval “on the condition that the recordings not be streamed, uploaded or posted in any form on the internet,” according to reporting from the Lock Haven Express.

The Sunshine Act, however, allows meetings to be recorded with an audio recorder or video recorder and does not require the recording to be announced in advance. And Melissa Melewsky, the media law counsel for the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, of which the CDT is a member, said a municipality cannot dictate how recordings are used.

“A municipality has no control over recordings made by members of the press or the public,” Melewsky wrote in an email. “Recordings are your private property and they’d need a warrant or court order to access them. You are free to share whatever you’d like, but you’re under no obligation to do so.”

Melewsky also said the statement on Milesburg’s agenda is “inconsistent with the Sunshine Act.”

“That law expressly grants the right to record public meetings to anyone in attendance and it also puts everyone on notice that recording is both allowed and possible,” she wrote.

Melewsky questioned the purpose for such a policy, writing that if the intent of the policy is to discourage the public from recording the meetings, then said policy would “run afoul of the law.”

According to the Office of Open Records, the Pennsylvania Sunshine Act states that any agency, such as a local township or borough, may place reasonable rules about recording only if the individual doing the recording is causing a disruption to the meeting.

For example, if you’re recording with a device and the device is loud and continually disrupting the meeting, the agency or municipality running the meeting has the right to request that the recording device be turned off or put away.

Other than that, according to the OOR, “such rules cannot be an attempt to prevent a member of the public from recording a meeting.”

The issue came up at this week’s borough council meeting, when council president Samantha Walker — who resigned abruptly at the same meeting — asked where the statement about recording came from.

“If you look at the top of our agenda, it says that it (recording) can’t be done without the council being made aware of it,” Walker said. “Is that in (borough) code, is that a resolution, is that in the Sunshine Act? I want to make sure that we’re following the rules and laws — or is this just a personal preference that was discussed by a former council member?”

Solicitor Tracey Benson said despite witnessing previous conversations discussing the matter in 2023, he hadn’t found any resolutions previously adopted by the council that mentioned rules around the recording of meetings.

“The OOR says the opposite (of the initial statement),” Milesburg resident Bryce Taylor said. “On the OOR’s) web page is says that you cannot require that notification.”

This story was originally published March 13, 2024 at 3:35 PM.