Pennsylvania’s open meetings law — the Sunshine Act — permits executive sessions for the purpose of discussing the purchase or lease of property.

But an executive session held by the Warren City Council earlier this week — aimed at discussing the downtown hotel project — discussed aspects of the project far beyond the sale of property, according to multiple people in the meeting.

Some of the items discussed included property subdivision, zoning, traffic flow, street vacation and parking. None of those items can legally be discussed in an executive session.

And city staff have indicated their belief that the public may not need to be fully informed on those issues.

The session included the Warren City Council as well as the city’s Redevelopment Authority and Planning Commission.

It was announced on council’s meeting agenda earlier this month.

“There will be a combined Executive Session of City Council, the Planning Commission, and the RDA on Monday, September 29, at 6:00 PM. The session will be held in Council Chambers and is for discussion regarding the disposition of City property, the agenda stated.

Before the meeting, City Manager Nancy Freenock told the Times Observer that the session was for discussion of city property, not disposition or sale.

Per the Sunshine Law, the consideration of “the purchase or lease of real property” is appropriate for an executive session.

Joint executive sessions can also be appropriate, according to Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel with the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association told the Times Observer.

The executive session exception does not apply to the sale or disposition of property.

“The executive session was enacted to protect the purchasing power of taxpayers,” Melewski explained. “If the agency is not purchasing or acquiring land by lease, there is no purchasing power at issue to protect and the executive session does not apply.”

In an effort to ensure fairness and a full presentation of this issue, the Times Observer has delayed publication in order to be able to speak with Freenock — on multiple occasions — and City Solicitor Andrea Stapleford.

Both Freenock and Stapleford confirmed the varying topics discussed in the session, after the Times Observer requested more information after a participant in the discussion said there may have been impropriety.

Freenock called the session “wide ranging.

“There were a number of things discussed, all relate to the entire project,” she said. “We try very hard to be transparent.”

“Agencies that are involved have to be educated before they can interact with the public,” Stapleford said. Without that education, a public meeting, she said, “wouldn’t be very productive.”

She argued a different section of the Sunshine Law that permits bodies to hold informational sessions.

However, Tuesday’s session was not announced as such.

She also suggested that case law around the Sunshine Law permits the closed-door discussion of the sale of public property.

A plain text reading of the statute yields no such conclusion.

So why keep the meeting closed?

Freenock said the meeting “would have been four hours” if open to the public and the “public would have been lost in the weeds.”

She suggested that she doesn’t know if the public needs to understand the intricacies of the property elements of the project.

“We had every intention to make it public,” Freenock said, outlining that the issue will be presented publicly at meeting on Oct. 12. “I wanted to know if we were missing anything. This is a pretty big project. I don’t want there to be a slip-up. I wanted to have all the parties in the same room. There was no intent to hide anything from the public.”

However, there are no exceptions in the Sunshine Law that would permit, essentially, strategic planning to be out of the public eye.

Freenock called the Tuesday session a “dress rehearsal” for the meeting on the 12th.

“There was no conscious attempt to obfuscate or keep anything from the public,” she insisted, indicating they looked at a map of the area to determine “what can we dispose of? What is being used where? We do have leases. … All of that was walked through so people could get an understanding.”

She indicated that she expects a formal appeal through the Office of Open Records relative to this meeting, driven by someone who wishes to stop the hotel. The Times Observer does not intend to be the entity that files that appeal.

Freenock indicated that questions were asked by participants in the meeting but said that there was “no deliberation.”

A give-and-take of ideas, though, would mean that the meeting was evidently not entirely informational.

Stapleford confirmed that all of the topics outlined were discussed but said “thoe are some of the topics that fall under the information session” that are “ancillary to the acquisition of property…”

Freenock said she “need them (the bodies in the meeting) to understand the basic structure. Matters will be coming to them for action.”

She said all of those body’s meetings would be publicly advertised.

“Because everything is so inter-related,” she said, everyone “should get the same information at the same time.”