Members of the Chapel Hill Town Council and University officials, including Mayor Rosemary Waldorf and Chancellor James Moeser, compose the committee, which will discuss cooperation between the town and UNC on issues that affect both bodies.
Whether the closed meetings will violate North Carolina's Open Meetings Law is still up for debate.
Council member Kevin Foy, a lawyer and member of the committee, said the meetings would not violate the statute because the group would not have the authority to take any action. The purpose of the committee is to bring the town and University together to discuss certain mutual concerns, he said.
"This is not a committee that has any authority to make any binding decision on the town," Foy said. "It's not possible that any decision would be made that the public was cut out of."
But Ruth Walden, a media law professor in the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said she thinks the meetings should have to legally be open, based on what she knows of the committee. Under N.C. open meetings law, meetings of public bodies that administer policy and perform advisory functions must be conducted openly.
"It appears this committee would meet the definition of a public body and therefore its meetings would have to be open to the public, unless the committee were considering a specific issue or question that fell within one of the designated justifications for a closed meeting under law," Walden said.
Council member Joyce Brown, who is not on the committee, said she takes issue with the group's meeting behind closed doors.
"What the mayor did was propose a mayor's committee - mayor's committees do not include the press or the public - that was one of my areas of concerns," Brown said.
Brown clarified that she does not object to the committee's formation, just that its meetings would not be open to the public. "I'm opposed to the way it's been proposed as a closed committee, closed to the public," she said. "I'm not opposed to the town and University talking."
