Definition Of A Walking Quorum

According to robert s rule of order the requirement for a quorum is protection against totally unrepresentative action in the name of the body by an unduly small number of.

Definition of a walking quorum. Listen as forney attorney alan lathrom provides the definition of walking quorum to the city council at the tuesday night work session. Some groups set a quorum as a percentage of membership and others use a fixed number. A walking quorum may produce a predetermined outcome and thus render a publicly held meeting a mere formality. On may 24 2019 attorney general ken paxton handed down an opinion at the request of commissioner of education mike morath providing some much needed clarity regarding walking quorums and the texas open meetings act the act.

This provision penalizes participants in what is sometimes called a walking quorum where members of a governmental body gather in numbers that do not physically constitute a quorum at any one time but who through successive gatherings secretly discuss a public matter with a quorum of the body with the objective of avoiding an open meeting. The requirements of the open meetings law also extend to walking quorums. A texas court first addressed the concept of a walking quorum in 1985 when it held that members of a school board of trustees violated the open meetings act by holding a series of informal telephone conferences to conduct district business that in total encompassed a quorum of trustees even though a quorum was never physically present at one. The quorum of a mass meeting is the number present at the time as they constitute the membership at that time.

A quorum is the minimum number of voting members who must be present of a deliberative assembly necessary to conduct the business of that group quorum 2013. Doyal that section. The request for opinion came after the court of criminal appeals ruled in state v. A quorum of an assembly is such a number as must be present in order that business can be legally transacted.

Walking quorum n walking quorums often called roaming quorums are those times when members of a government body a city council or school board for instance discuss public business outside of public meetings. A walking quorum is a series of gatherings among separate groups of members of a governmental body each less than quorum size who agree tacitly or explicitly to act uniformly in sufficient number to reach a quorum. A walking quorum is a series of gatherings among separate groups of members of a governmental body each less than quorum size who agree tacitly or explicitly to act uniformly in sufficient number to reach a quorum.