The City of Minot plans to ask the Legislature for changes to North Dakota’s open records law.

The city’s experience during its recent investigation into allegations against the police chief, as well as a potential move to a merit-based employee pay system, are prompting the city’s request.

City Manager Harold Stewart told legislators attending a special council meeting Friday that the city would like to exempt personnel records from the open records law and make them confidential.

“We’ve been in the heat of the moment with regards to a very public personnel issue, and having the public scrutiny as part of that process in an already complicated process exacerbates that significantly more,” he said. “I’m not opposed to transparency at some point, but at the heat of the moment, while those individuals are employees of ours, that creates substantial risks and concerns.”

In addition, the law should change to allow the city council to go into a closed session to discuss personnel matters, Stewart said. He cited concerns about public discussions creating records that can be used against the city in court.

“I’m constrained in my ability to keep the council informed with regards to significant personnel matters because I’m not comfortable talking about things in an open public meeting, due to the liability concerns that I would have with the sensitivity of some of those matters,” he said. “There are some matters that we deal with that are very complex and should be maintained as confidential.”

Council member Mike Blessum said Rep. Scott Louser, R-Minot, has a bill drafted on the law change. He said the driving force has been a proposed across-the-board increase of 7% this year. He said he would rather target higher raises to higher performing employees.

“This is something, from my perspective, to make sure that we can run the city in, financially, the best way we can. This is an important piece of that,” Blessum said of the open records change.

Stewart said closing employee records would be helpful if performance-based pay is adopted.

“As long as all of our evaluations are open records, sometimes some constructive feedback could be misinterpreted or misconstrued by the public as though an employee is not performing properly, when that’s not the case. We’re just trying to help our employees be better and set goals and objectives for them to be able to accomplish that,” Stewart said.