FAIRHOPE, Ala. — The Tree Committee met Thursday for its quarterly meeting.

The first item on the agenda, to approve the minutes, is normally a simple and quick matter, with a few words sometimes changed at a member’s recommendation.

But approving the minutes of the July 17 meeting was a different matter and took longer.

Consideration of the draft minutes at Thursday’s meeting revealed that a presentation made at the July 17 Tree Committee meeting about the Publix grocery store under construction on U.S. 98 and Parker had been left off the document.

When that was discovered, Tom Ellis, the committee chair, asked the secretary, Betty Rivenbark, who is also Mayor Tim Kant’s secretary, what happened.

“I had already left the meeting,” Rivenbark said. “It was adjourned.”

The committee members did not say anything for several seconds in response to that statement.

Then Paul Ripp, not a committee member, but the one who made the presentation about Publix at the July meeting, said he thought he was addressing the committee while it was in session.

Committee member Mariah Gwynn also said that a question she raised about that development was not included in the minutes and that the meeting was in session when she was speaking.

“My question preceded Ripp’s (presentation),” she said.

Several other members concurred that the meeting had not adjourned, and that the Publix discussion resulted in a request to Public Works Director Jennifer Fidler to follow up on some of the concerns with a site visit

“Betty, I think that is an error,” Ellis said, referring to the information left off the minutes.

Ellis then confirmed with the group the language to be added to the minutes, wrote it out in longhand and gave it to Rivenbark.

The issue of meeting minutes, how they are taken and what happens when they conflict with other information surfaced in a story in the Wednesday issue of the Fairhope Courier regarding another development on U.S. 98.

The builder of the BancorpSouth project at the entrance to the Rock Creek subdivision received a “notice of violation” from the state environmental agency for a stormwater runoff incident that occurred in May. While reporting on the status of the builder’s cleanup of the sediment that had flowed into Rock Creek and adjacent wetlands, the Fairhope Courier discovered in Planning Department files that the department director had made handwritten notes at a July 2007 City Council meeting indicating that the project was approved subject to pervious parking in the employer parking lot. However, the minutes from that council meeting only indicated that the engineering firm said they would “look into some alternatives.”

The current project manager for Gaillard Builders said pervious parking was not used in the parking lot, and he did not believe it was required.

The minutes of council meetings and all other public city meetings, are recorded by hand by a clerk or secretary.

In some cities, such as Daphne, the meetings are recorded digitally or on tape, and those tapes are used to help prepare the minutes, the Daphne city clerk said.