The City Council met briefly on Tuesday and voted to authorize the destruction of both audio and video recordings of closed-session meetings and will release some of the closed-session meeting minutes.

Anything recordings from the closed-session meetings older than 18 months will be destroyed and not released to the public.

While the older recordings are being destroyed, all audio and video will be sifted through every six months. Some will be deleted while others will be released.

City Clerk, Deborah Muller said that the video and audio are reviewed every six months.

“They are typically reviewed three times by the council members and are archived,” she said.

Muller said that the city attorney reviews the audio and video and then makes recommendations in regards to the deletions. The council also reviews them and the recordings are then disposed based upon those decisions.

“Anything that is not blacked out is going to be available for the public to look at, which in some cases means not a lot,” she said.

There are certain statutes that exempt the council from sharing all video and audio to the public, she said.

“The redacted footage would probably just have a lot of black lines on it,” Muller said.

The council also recognized the month of February as Black History Month.

“Every year we will do something different such as Black History or farmers market week; there’s different proclamations that we do,” said Mayor Brandon Combs.

This is not the first time that the council has recognized February as Black History Month, as they acknowledge this nationally proclaimed month every year.

The City Council meeting was only about 5 minutes.

“This was the shortest council meeting in 14 years,” said Muller.

The next city council meeting will be held Jan. 31.City

Liz Stephens can be reached at 581-2812 or ejstephens2@eiu.edu.