Who the Law Covers

Before you ask whether a board broke the open meeting law, ask whether the law applies to it at all. Most of the time the answer is obviously yes. A city council or a school board is covered. The interesting cases sit at the edges: a citizen task force, a staff working group, a board the governor set up by executive order, a nonprofit that runs the county fair. The answer lives in two definitions in Idaho Code 74-202, and you can apply them in about two minutes once you know the steps.

The chapter opens with a policy statement in 74-201: the people "do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies so created," and forming public policy "shall not be conducted in secret." The Attorney General's manual turns that into a working rule for officials: when in doubt, open the meeting. Hold boards to it.

Test one: is it a public agency?

74-202(4) lists four kinds of public agency. A body has to fit at least one.

Category (a) carries one built-in exclusion: courts and their agencies and divisions, the judicial council and the district magistrates commission are not public agencies.

The executive-order wrinkle

Here's a trap. In 2018 the Legislature passed House Bill 606, which pulled boards created by the governor's executive order under the law (while carving out the governor's cybersecurity task force and the committee that awards the Idaho medal of achievement). The bill had a built-in switch: on July 1, 2023, sections 2 and 3 repealed that version and put in a new 74-202 with the executive-order language gone. The text on the Legislature's site today is that post-2023 version. The Attorney General's July 2026 manual still prints the older wording in its copy of the statute and still mentions executive orders in its answers about subagencies. When the manual and the code disagree, cite the code, and when you raise it at a meeting, in testimony or online, say that the AG manual's text is out of date on this point.

So what about a body created only by executive order today? The current definition covers state agencies "created by or pursuant to statute." If a governor's order rests on a statute that authorizes it, a good argument exists that the body was created "pursuant to" that statute. If not, the body may fall outside the definition. That's an open question, and you should describe it as one.

Test two: is there a governing body?

The law opens the meetings of a governing body. 74-202(5) defines that as "the members of any public agency that consists of two (2) or more members, with the authority to make decisions for or recommendations to a public agency regarding any matter." Break that apart:

• Two or more members. A department run by a single director has no governing body. Neither does the governor acting alone. The director can meet with staff in private all day.
• Authority to decide or recommend. A group that merely carries out policy someone else set, with no power to decide or recommend, is outside the law.

The leading case is Safe Air for Everyone v. Idaho State Department of Agriculture, 145 Idaho 164 (2008). The department held a closed meeting on crop residue burning with federal, state and tribal officials. Some department employees attended; the director did not. An environmental group argued the director had delegated authority to the employees, making them a governing body. The Idaho Supreme Court disagreed. Any decision the employees made could be overruled by a supervisor, and the court said authority to decide or recommend "must be statutorily based."

One caution from the AG manual: other laws can still require openness. Under the Idaho Administrative Procedure Act, state agencies, including single-director ones, hold public proceedings when they make rules and decide certain contested cases.

Committees and advisory boards

The AG manual's answer is two-pronged. An advisory committee is covered if it was created by or pursuant to a statute, ordinance or other legislative act, and it has authority to make recommendations to a public agency. It needs both. A voluntary internal staff group that nobody created by legislative act is not covered, even if its talks lead to recommendations.

The manual also borrows a Washington Supreme Court case, Cathcart v. Anderson (1975), for a useful point about "created by or pline x1="535" y1="76" x2="535" y2="130" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2"/> yes On an exemption list(74-202, 74-203)? no Covered: meetings open Any "no" above, or exempt:not covered by this chapter

The short exemption lists

Beyond the courts, the chapter exempts very little, and all of it is named:

• Adjudicatory deliberations of the Board of Tax Appeals, the Public Utilities Commission and the Industrial Commission, once a case is fully submitted and hearings are done (74-203(2)). The hearings themselves, and every other kind of deliberation at those agencies, stay open. The agencies may also choose to deliberate in public.
• Four named bodies in 74-203(3): the Idaho life and health insurance guaranty association, the Idaho insurance guaranty association, the surplus line association, and, since 2025, the Idaho Depredating Wildlife Appeals Board.
• Legislative committees run under their own section, 74-207. Standing, special and select committees are open "at all times," except in extraordinary circumstances set out in each chamber's rules. Anyone may attend, but may speak only with the committee's approval.

Private groups are outside the law entirely. The AG manual says so plainly for homeowners associations and charitable nonprofits. A nonprofit that manages a public facility under contract is still a private nonprofit for this chapter, though the public agency that signed the contract must make its own decisions in the open.