Odesa City Council conceals minutes of standing commission meetings before a session

The independent journalist initiative "Center for Public Investigations" analyzed how Odesa City Council deputies were preparing for the September 18 plenary meeting. The journalists found that two-thirds of the minutes of the standing City Council commissions were not published on the eve of the meeting, reports the Center for Public Investigations.

The team sourced the data for analysis from the Deputies' Portal, where videos of committee meetings, lists of attending deputies, agendas and minutes are available.

From July 12 to September 17, 2024, 27 standing commission meetings were scheduled, of which four were postponed. However, of the 23 meetings that did take place, minutes only to eight were published, which is only a third of the total number.

The journalists note that 10 commission meetings were held less than 10 days before the plenary meeting and three meetings were scheduled for less than a day before the event.

The head of the Center for Public Investigations, Valeriy Bolhan, pointed out the decreasing openness of local self-government. In a comment to the regional IMI representative in Odesa oblast, he said that he had noticed an alarming growth in the number of violations of the law on access to public information by local authorities.

"Delayed releases or complete absence of decisions, orders, and projects deprive the community of important information. This creates an environment of obscurity, where citizens are unable to control the decision-making process. In such an environment, the risk of making unperfected or even corrupt decisions increases, and those are much more difficult to cancel or correct later," Bolhan emphasized.

Roman Holovenko, a lawyer at the Institute of Mass Information, notes that in accordance with the Law of Ukraine "On Access to Public Information", the minutes of Council commissions are generally made public within five days after being approved (Part 2, Article 15).