FAIRHOPE, Ala. — After meeting this year without first giving public notice of its place and time, a city “financial subcommittee” gave notice last week that the group would meet publicly this coming Monday.

Certain public bodies, including those at which a majority of (the body’s) members are present, are required to give advance notice of their meetings, according to the state Open Meetings Act.

“The reason we got together this morning is sort of an informal get together,” said City Council President Lonnie Mixon at that Feb. 17 meeting in the conference room at City Hall. “We’re not right on budget at this time, and that’s one of the reasons for this meeting.”

Attending the meeting were Councilman Rick Kingrea, Mayor Tim Kant, City Treasurer Nancy Wilson, City Administrator Gregg Mims, Administrative Superintendent James Gillespie, Financial Reporting Manager Rose Fogarty, as well as Chuck Zunk, chairman of the council-appointed Financial Advisory Committee, and Stan Grubin, a member of that committee.

Had there been one more council member present, there would have been a majority present of the city’s five-member council, which would have triggered the Open Meetings Act, said a Montgomery attorney for the Alabama Press Association.

“It’s an unsettled area of the law and an evolving one,” said Dennis Bailey, referring to meetings where less than a majority of members are present, but where government business is being conducted. “It will take the courts to interpret the act regarding issues like these.”

Several recent cases involving such “serial meetings” have reached the trial level in Alabama but not yet the appellate courts, he said.

The Fairhope group met for more than an hour last month, discussing in detail the municipal budget, including the most recent financial figures available through January 2010.

This was the first meeting, if not formally a public one, at which numbers that conflicted with the more positive picture given in the annual audit released earlier in the year. At that February meeting, Kant informed the group of a number of financial challenges the city faced if it were not to exceed its budget for the year. Some of those issues included the purchase of 40 acres of property for recreational ball fields, and a significant deficit in the city’s public golf course revenues.

The Fairhope Courier learned of the Feb. 17 meeting and attended part of it, but it was the only media or public representative present, with no citizens or local residents in attendance.

At the start of that meeting, Kant made a point of noting that the press was in attendance and that it was not a closed meeting.

Mixon said after last Monday’s council meeting that the group had only met that one time and in an informal setting.

Nevertheless, late last week, the city clerk’s office, which is responsible for issuing public notices pursuant to the Open Meetings Act for the council, boards, committees and other municipal bodies, issued a notice for the “Financial Sub Committee.” The subject heading of the notice lists “various finance issues” as possible agenda items.

“We looked around the table and realized we might have a majority of Financial Advisory Committee members,” Mixon said Monday, leading to the decision, he said, to give public notice of the group’s next meeting.

He said the name of subcommittee might change, or that it might simply become a meeting of the full FAC, at which all council members are members, as well as the mayor and several other local volunteers in addition to the two who attended on Feb. 17.

The Fairhope Financial Sub Committee, as its name was listed by the city clerk’s office last week, will meet at 9 a.m., Monday, March 8, in the conference room at City Hall at 161 N. Section Street.