A little audio recorder incites a big uproar | Steve Bousquet

Fort Lauderdale’s historic playhouse, The Parker, proudly displays plaques on its wall listing performers who have graced its stage through the years.

Rita Moreno. Tony Randall. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Elizabeth Taylor. Milton Berle (in “Norman, Is That You?” from 1972).

Uncle Miltie had a flair for the outrageous.

So does The Parker’s current act: the Fort Lauderdale City Commission.

The 1,200-seat playhouse serves as a temporary commission meeting place since floods washed out City Hall in April. It became a theater of the absurd this week because of an audio recorder left unattended during a break between two meetings.

What unfolded on the Parker stage Tuesday could have lasting repercussions.

Public meetings in Florida are open, by law. That includes use of recording equipment. As long as you’re not being disruptive, you do not need anyone’s permission to set up a camera or turn on a recorder. In a room filled with cameras and microphones, no one should have an expectation of privacy.

On Sept. 13, lawyer Barbra Stern hired a videographer to record two city meetings. A hand-held sound recorder was left on the podium during a recess. A couple of residents nearby saw it and wondered if their personal conversations were being secretly monitored.

That’s ludicrous, said Stern, who was not there at the time.

“Nothing was hidden. Nothing was planted,” Stern said.

But resident Jackie Scott alerted the city manager, who in turn alerted the police chief.

“The police chief asked us if we wanted to press charges. We said no,” Scott told commissioners. “We just wanted to make sure that our personal conversations that occurred after the meeting ended would be erased, so we were perfectly fine.”

That should have brought the curtain down on this melodrama. It didn’t.

City Attorney D’Wayne Spence said he was “concerned” that his private talks on legal matters with commissioners could be monitored, noting that Florida’s two-party consent law for recording conversations.

City Manager Greg Chavarria told his bosses the recorder was in plain view. “It was very apparent it wasn’t surveillance,” Chavarria said.

The next thing you knew, the mayor and commissioners were debating the legality of “listening devices” being “planted,” and Mayor Dean Trantalis raised the possibility of “enforcement action.”

“I think it’s a little sneaky to be sticking listening devices in places where we’re unaware, especially when it’s not just us, it’s the public, too,” Trantalis said. He suggested a need for “rules as to who’s entitled to record us, and should we have notice of those recording devices in advance.”

LISTEN: Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis talks about the use of recording devices at commission meetings.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” interjected a skeptical Commissioner Warren Sturman. “When you’re up here, you have an assumption that you’re being recorded. If you have a private conversation, you leave.”

Sturman is right. Any requirement by Fort Lauderdale for anyone to provide notification of intent to record a meeting would be outrageous and subject to a court challenge.

Stern unearthed a decades-old advisory opinion from the state attorney general — at the time, Broward’s Bob Butterworth — who cautioned the North Florida town of Midway that it had no right to prevent recording of meetings.

“While a public board may adopt reasonable rules and policies to ensure the orderly conduct of its public meetings,” the 1991 legal opinion said, “rules prohibiting the use of silent or non-disruptive tape recording devices would appear to be unreasonable and arbitrary, and therefore invalid.”

Stern, a well-known figure in city politics, is the daughter of lobbyist and political consultant Judy Stern, who received harsh criticism from Trantalis and Commissioner Steven Glassman Tuesday in her role as chair of the Charter Revision Board, where she mentioned both officials by name during board meetings.

Shocked by what she saw as official contempt for open government, Barbra Stern fired off a letter to the ACLU’s legal counsel in Florida, asking him to be on “high alert” and to keep watch on Trantalis.

“His statements clearly have a chilling effect which would serve as a deterrent to anyone else who would want to record a public meeting or record people in public forums,” Stern wrote. “As you know, any enforcement action by a governmental body to prevent the recording of a public meeting would be a violation of the law.”

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @stevebousquet.