Background
Oklahoma Schools Risk Management Trust (OSRMT) is a public trust formed under the Interlocal Cooperation Act to provide member-funded self-insurance coverage to Oklahoma public schools. In April 2019, OSRMT’s Board of Trustees voted — at a properly noticed meeting — to amend the governing Trust Agreement by adding a new, nonrefundable “reserve (capital) contribution” charge on member districts, designed to shore up the pool’s reserves as membership declined. The April vote was undisputed to have complied with the Open Meeting Act (OMA).
When OSRMT submitted the amended Trust Agreement to the Attorney General for required approval, the AG’s office rejected it on June 7, 2019, for reasons unrelated to the reserve contribution. On June 10, OSRMT’s counsel learned the Board could not simply excise the rejected provision — it would have to vote on an entirely new version of the amendment and resubmit it. Critically, the agenda for the Board’s June 12 meeting had already been posted on June 7 and contained only a generic “New Business” line item; OSRMT neither amended the agenda nor rescheduled the meeting. At the June 12 meeting, the Board voted under “New Business” to adopt the revised amendment, which the AG approved on July 17, 2019. The amendment took effect July 1, 2020.
When dozens of member school districts refused to pay invoices issued under the amended Trust Agreement, OSRMT sued for breach and a declaratory judgment of enforceability. The respondent school districts raised OMA violations as a defense. After cross-motions for partial summary judgment, the Cleveland County District Court (Judge Thad Balkman) ruled that OSRMT had willfully violated the OMA, rendering the June 12 action invalid. The trial court certified the order for interlocutory review; the Oklahoma Supreme Court granted review.
The Court’s Holding
The Supreme Court (Vice Chief Justice Kuehn, joined by Chief Justice Rowe and Justices Edmondson, Combs, Gurich, and Darby) affirmed the trial court’s grant of partial summary judgment in favor of the school districts. The Court held that the OMA’s “new business” exception — which allows a public body to address matters “not known about or which could not have been reasonably foreseen prior to the time of the posting” — applies only to genuinely unanticipated matters that arise within the statutory 24-hour notice window before a regular meeting. It does not permit a public body to sweep in any item that arose after an agenda was first posted, no matter how far in advance that posting occurred. Because OSRMT knew on June 10 — more than 24 hours before the June 12 meeting — that the Board would need to vote on a new amended Trust Agreement, the matter was outside the permissible scope of “New Business.”
The Court further held that the violation was willful under the OMA. Willfulness does not require bad faith or intent to evade the statute; it requires only that a public body consciously act outside requirements it knows or should know. OSRMT had two days to post an amended agenda, defer the vote to the next regular meeting, or call a special meeting, and instead allowed the vague “New Business” heading to stand. The Court characterized the “New Business” label as used here as deceptively vague and likely to mislead the public — the hallmark of willfulness in the Court’s OMA precedents. Because the June 12 vote was taken in willful violation of the OMA, it is subject to invalidation under 25 O.S. § 313.
Having resolved the case on the agenda-notice issue, the Court declined to address the separate question of whether OSRMT’s failure to notify the Secretary of State of the one-day meeting rescheduling also constituted a willful violation. Justice Kane concurred in part and dissented in part, stating he would not find a willful violation. Justices Jett and Winchester dissented, arguing the revised amendment was legitimately “new business” because the need to re-enact it was neither known nor foreseeable at the time the agenda was actually posted on June 7, and that OSRMT’s interpretation of the statute was reasonable given the absence of prior precedent construing “time of posting.”
Key Takeaways
- Under the Oklahoma OMA, the “new business” exception is limited to matters that were genuinely unknown and unforeseeable within the 24-hour agenda-posting window before a meeting — not any matter that arose after the agenda was first physically or digitally posted, regardless of when posting occurred.
- Willfulness under the OMA requires no showing of bad faith or intent to deceive; a public body acts willfully when it consciously proceeds with action it knows, or should know, falls outside the statute’s requirements.
- When a public body learns of substantive new business more than 24 hours before a meeting, the OMA provides compliant alternatives — amending the agenda, deferring to the next regular meeting, or calling a special meeting — and failure to use any of them is a willful violation that can invalidate the resulting action under 25 O.S. § 313.
- Public trusts created under the Interlocal Cooperation Act, including school district risk pools, are “public bodies” subject to OMA notice and agenda requirements.
- A substantive re-vote on a previously approved measure is itself substantive action requiring specific agenda notice; characterizing it as ministerial “housekeeping” does not insulate it from OMA scrutiny.
Why It Matters
This decision clarifies a previously unsettled question in Oklahoma open-meetings law: the “new business” escape valve is pegged to the statutory 24-hour posting deadline, not to whenever a public body happened to post its agenda. Boards and administrators who post agendas days or weeks in advance can no longer treat intervening developments as automatically eligible for the “new business” exception — if the board knows about an item with more than 24 hours to spare, it must amend the agenda or defer action. The ruling gives practitioners a clear bright-line rule that closes a loophole the majority feared would render the OMA’s notice requirements “a formality.”
For school districts and other entities that participate in interlocal cooperative trusts, the decision carries immediate practical stakes: if a court ultimately invalidates the June 2019 amendment, OSRMT’s authority to collect the reserve (capital) contributions that are the subject of the underlying lawsuit may be fatally undermined. More broadly, the case signals that Oklahoma courts will construe OMA exceptions narrowly and in favor of public transparency, and that the willfulness threshold — though not requiring bad faith — will be satisfied whenever a public body has both knowledge of an unagendaed item and adequate time to cure the deficiency before proceeding.