When Must a City Official’s Closed-Door Meetings Be Open to the Public?
Your business applies for one of a handful of municipal licenses. A city administrator pulls together a group of department heads to review the applications. They meet several times, take no notes, and months later you learn that you were not selected. Should those meetings have been public? The Michigan Supreme Court took up a version of that question in Exclusive Capital Partners LLC v City of Royal Oak, decided July 23, 2026, and the answer depends on who held the decision-making power in the first place.
When Does an Individual Official or Advisory Board Fall Under the Open Meetings Act?
The Act requires certain meetings of certain public bodies to be open to the public, and the Court confirmed that a government entity becomes a public body through one of two pathways: it satisfies the statutory definition on its own, as a legislative or governing body empowered by a charter, statute, ordinance, resolution, or rule to exercise governmental authority, or it is delegated authority by another public body. The first pathway has a built-in limit. The phrase describes a collective entity, so a board or committee can be one, but an individual executive acting in his executive capacity cannot, no matter how much power the job carries.
The written instrument is not the end of the analysis. In Pinebrook Warren, LLC v City of Warren, the Court looked past an ordinance that gave the city council the final vote and found that a scoring committee labeled advisory was the real decision-maker because the council adopted its rankings without independently weighing the applications. Exclusive Capital Partners leaves that intact and adds the step that comes first. Before asking whether a group is exercising someone else’s authority in practice, a court has to identify whose authority it was to begin with.
Royal Oak capped recreational marijuana retail licenses at two and received 21 applications. The city manager convened a workgroup of city officials to help him evaluate them, met with them four times without notes, and selected two applicants. Two rejected applicants sued. The Court ruled for the city. The ordinance gave the city manager, not the city commission, the power to rank applicants and fill the license slots, so he was not exercising delegated commission authority. He was acting alone under an independent grant of his own, and as an individual, he could not be a public body in his own right. The commission’s only role was final site plan approval, which does not involve choosing among competitors. The Court also rejected the argument that any ordinance-based grant triggers the Act, asking instead, under Booth Newspapers, whether the public body handed off a function it was required by law to perform, whether the arrangement was designed to evade the Act, and whether the authority went to a subgroup of the body’s own members. None of that was present.
Practical Takeaways
Start with the ordinance, not the meeting. If it vests the decision in a council or commission and a staff group is functionally making the call, Pinebrook is still good law and you have a real open-meetings claim. If it vests the decision in a single administrator, closed-door review is lawful and your challenge has to rest on something else, such as the scoring criteria or the underlying statute. For municipalities, the drafting choice is the whole ballgame: naming an individual administrator in the ordinance keeps the process outside the Act, while routing it through a committee under a governing body’s authority does not.