MTCA compromises on recording ban

Video of board meetings available to unit owners on dkcondo.com

January 30, 2009 – While not lifting restrictions on unit owners recording board meetings, Marina Towers Condominium Association has officially allowed itself to record board meetings.

A resolution approved by the board at its January 15 meeting says video of board meetings, including comments from unit owners, which had been maintained in the files of the condo association, would be made available on web pages hosted by the residential property management company, Draper & Kramer, Inc. The web pages are meant to be accessed by unit owners only.

Addressing privacy concerns involving owners making comments at board meetings, MTCA says it will require those attending meetings to sign in. Presumably, owners would be signing an acknowledgement that they are being recorded. Owners would be banned from providing a copy of the video to someone who was not a unit owner.

On September 24, 2008, MTCA banned unit owners from recording board meetings. Owners were not allowed to comment before the rule was put into effect, and a tape recorder in use at the time was confiscated. A Chicago attorney who specializes in real estate law says the resolution violates the Condominium Property Act, Illinois Constitution, and the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. R. Kymn Harp said if challenged, the rule would be found in court to be invalid and unenforceable.

One of the reasons given by the board for the recording ban was that it hinders owners attending meetings from expressing their opinions.

In August 2008, many unit owners were surprised to learn that discretely-located security cameras were recording gatherings in the room MTCA leases for board meetings. Landmark Marina City Now, a group promoting official landmark status for Marina City, offered a link from its web site to a video of a panel discussion held in the MTCA meeting room on June 16. The video file was hosted on the MTCA web site, mymtca.com.

The cameras, mounted on the ceiling near each corner of the meeting room, resemble other security cameras located in common areas of the commercial platform.

(Above) A frame from the June 16, 2008, meeting organized by Landmark Marina City Now to discuss official landmark status for Marina City.

Marina City Online may have inadvertently influenced the new rules. For most of 2008, MCO obtained audio recordings of meetings from unit owners, wrote a news article about each meeting, and made the original audio available on its web site.