Editorial Tue, July 28
Brookings has a transparency problem, but not the kind anyone wants to hear about. The city isn't hiding anything. If anything, it's disclosing too much, too often, in language so repetitive that it risks teaching residents to stop reading the very notices meant to keep them informed.
Look at the summer calendar. A quorum notice for the 4-H Achievement Day BBQ on August 6. Another for the New Resident BBQ on September 15. Three separate notices for Downtown at Sundown, on July 30, August 6, and August 13. A fourth for Meet State at SDSU on August 21. Each one says essentially the same thing: several council members might show up, a quorum might technically form, but no city business will be discussed or acted upon. This is boilerplate required by state open-meetings law, and the city is right to file it. But six near-identical notices in six weeks, all announcing that nothing will happen, train residents to read “quorum notice” as a synonym for “ignore this.”
That's a problem, because not every notice this summer says nothing will happen. On July 30, the same night as a Downtown at Sundown quorum notice, the actual City Council met and took up real business: a public hearing on leasing city property to RTI, LLC, a second reading on a budget amendment, and a hearing to annex two outlots into city limits. These are the kinds of decisions that shape how land gets used and who profits from it. They deserve scrutiny. But they were surrounded, that same week, by a cloud of routine notices about barbecues and street festivals, all using the same civic language, the same format, the same “no business will be conducted” reassurance. A resident skimming the public notices could be forgiven for lumping them all together and moving on.
This is not an argument against the law. Open-meetings statutes exist because quorums have a way of becoming informal decision-making sessions if nobody's watching, and South Dakota is right to require disclosure whenever enough council members might be in the same place at the same time. The problem isn't the law. It's that the city is applying the letter of the requirement without much thought to how the requirement is communicated, and the result is a kind of notice fatigue that works against the law's purpose.
Some will say this is a minor gripe, that residents who care about local governance will read the agendas regardless of how many BBQ notices clutter the calendar. Maybe. But most people don't parse city communications for a living. They skim headlines, and if six headlines in a row say “nothing to see here,” the seventh gets the same treatment by default, even if it's the one about an actual land deal.
There's a simple fix, and it doesn't require changing any law. The city could distinguish, in format and framing, between notices tied to substantive meetings and notices tied to purely social gatherings. A single seasonal notice, filed once, could cover all the summer's Downtown at Sundown dates and community BBQs where council presence is expected but no action is planned. That would satisfy the legal requirement without repeating the same non-event announcement five or six times across a summer. It would also free up attention, both the city's and the public's, for the notices that actually matter: hearings on annexation, leases, rezoning, budget amendments.
Transparency isn't just about filing the right paperwork. It's about making sure people can tell the difference between a barbecue and a decision. Right now, Brookings is technically compliant and functionally noisy, and noise is its own kind of obscurity. If the city wants residents to keep paying attention when it counts, it needs to stop asking them to pay the same attention to everything.
Editorial Tue, July 21
Every Thursday this summer, the city of Brookings has issued the same small notice, week after week, ahead of Downtown at Sundown: at least four City Council members might show up. No official business. No votes. Just a heads-up that if you're out on Main Avenue between 5:30 and 9, you might spot a majority of your elected representatives enjoying a bratwurst alongside everyone else. Five weeks running now, the notice has landed with the same dutiful, unremarkable wording. It would be easy to read this as bureaucratic overkill, a legal department covering its bases for an event that is, by any reasonable measure, just a street party. That reading is wrong. This weekly quorum notice is exactly the kind of quiet, unglamorous transparency that keeps small-town government honest, and Brookings residents should recognize it as a model rather than roll their eyes at it.
Here is the logic behind the notice. South Dakota's open meetings law, like similar statutes across the country, exists because a quorum of elected officials gathered in one place creates the possibility, however incidental, of informal deliberation happening outside public view. It doesn't matter that the setting is a summer festival instead of a council chamber. If four or more members of a five-or-seven-person body are standing together listening to music or eating a taco, in principle a conversation could drift toward policy, and the public would have no record of it. The law doesn't assume bad faith. It assumes that informal proximity is exactly the condition under which real business quietly gets done, and that citizens deserve a heads-up when that condition might arise.
The easy objection is obvious: nobody actually believes four council members are going to hash out the next budget resolution between bites of a funnel cake. Isn't this just legal theater, a box checked for the sake of checking it? That skepticism misses what the notice is actually protecting against. The danger was never a single dramatic backroom deal at a street fair. It's the slow normalization of officials treating public proximity as private space, one casual gathering at a time, until nobody thinks to ask whether decisions are being shaped somewhere other than the council table. The notice is not evidence that Brookings has a problem. It's evidence that the city is keeping a habit alive precisely so the problem never gets a chance to start.
There's also something worth admiring in the sheer repetitiveness of it. Five weeks of nearly identical language, publishing the same disclaimer for the same low-stakes event, is not exciting news. It won't drive traffic or spark debate. But that's the point. Good governance is rarely dramatic. It looks like routine, procedural steps taken so consistently that they become invisible, until the day someone actually needs them. A city that bothers to file this notice even when the stakes are this low is a city that will almost certainly file it when the stakes are higher, when a quorum happens to gather somewhere less charming than Main Avenue on a Thursday evening.
Compare this to the alternative, which residents of larger cities know all too well: officials who mingle informally, make decisions in hallways or fundraisers or golf outings, and leave constituents piecing together after the fact what was actually discussed. Brookings is not immune to that risk simply because it's small. Small towns can be more vulnerable to it, in fact, because everyone already knows everyone, and the line between “neighbors talking” and “officials deliberating” blurs easily when the neighbors happen to hold public office. The quorum notice draws that line deliberately, every single week, whether or not anyone reads it.
So when the next notice arrives before Downtown at Sundown, don't file it under civic trivia. File it under the kind of unglamorous discipline that keeps local government accountable in a town too small and too familiar for accountability to be automatic. The council isn't hiding anything by showing up to enjoy the evening. They're doing something better: telling you exactly where they'll be, and why it matters that you know.