A media law expert called Student Congress’ passage of a bill Tuesday night a “blatant disregard of the Open Meetings Act.”

Joey Senat, board member and former president of Freedom of Information Oklahoma Inc., said amending a bill to change its intent is a violation of the Open Meetings Act.

At an Undergraduate Student Congress meeting Tuesday night, a resolution to amend OU’s smoking policy was sent back to committee.

Later in the meeting, Matthew Gress, Undergraduate Student Congress Vice Chairman, reintroduced and amended the bill to make the appointment of an election board the bill’s intent.

The original bill, authored by UOSA President Katie Fox, was not on the agenda because Gress said he didn’t see an e-mail from Fox notifying him to add it to the agenda.

Gress defended Congress’s passage of the bill, saying Congress has the right to amend legislation on its agenda.

When asked whether the bill’s passage violated the spirit and intent of the Open Meetings Act, Gress said he was unsure.

The Oklahoma Open Meetings Act requires public bodies identify “all items of business to be transacted” on their agenda.

Senat, who also is an Oklahoma State University journalism professor, said if city councils were allowed to pass legislation in this way, there would be no point to the Open Meetings Act at all.

“The basic problem is that these student governments try to operate as though they’re state legislatures ... but [the Open Meetings Act] applies to the student government,” Senat said.

The Oklahoma State Legislature, like many state legislatures, has exempted itself from the Open Meetings Act.

“[Student government’s] role model for conducting meetings should be a city council meeting, not state legislature,” Senat said.

Senat said violating the Open Meetings Act is a misdemeanor, and any citizen could file a complaint with local law enforcement and ask for an investigation.

If someone files a civil lawsuit and an action is found to be in violation of the act, then that action is invalidated, Senat said.

At the meeting, humanities representative Shayna Daitch questioned whether the passage of the bill was legal, but did not object to it, “because everyone else seemed to be in agreement with Gress ... and it still would have passed.”

But Wednesday, she said the passage of the bill seems to be illegal.

“The whole reason we post agendas is so that people know what we’re going to be talking about,” Daitch said. “When you change the title and the body to make it different, then that is not what was on the agenda.”

Fox said she didn’t have the legal expertise to comment on the legality of the bills passage, but if it were found in violation of the law she would advise the election board to continue volunteering its time unofficially.

“We still have to run the election no matter the technicalities,” Fox said.

Daitch said Rep. Joe Dorman, D-Rush Springs, would be speaking to UOSA about parliamentary procedure, which would include knowledge of the Open Meetings Act on March 23.

This is the second time this semester the Undergraduate Student Congress may have violated the act. In the first instance, legislation absent from the agenda was introduced as emergency legislation, according to the UOSA Constitution. This passage was criticized as a possible violation of the Open Meetings Act because it may not have met the criteria for emergency legislation according to the Open Meetings Act.