Approved open-meeting minutes are permanent records for every Michigan public body. Here are the exact retention rules, quoted from the official DTMB schedules, with a link to verify each one at the source.
If you keep one retention rule in your head, make it this one: approved open-meeting minutes are permanent records. Not seven years, not until the storage room fills up. Permanent. The rule appears in the schedule that applies to every Michigan public body:
DTMB General Schedule #35 (Administrative Records), item 35.116; approved 6/6/2023. Applies to all Michigan public bodies.
The office-specific schedules say the same thing. For township clerks:
DTMB General Schedule #25 (Township Clerks), item 25.200; approved 6/17/2008.
School districts get the same outcome with a different mechanism: their board minutes outlive the district itself.
DTMB General Schedule #2 (Michigan Public Schools), item 2.0200; approved 4/11/2023.
Minutes are the official record of what a public body decided: every motion, every roll-call vote, every resolution. Under the Open Meetings Act they are also on a statutory production clock (proposed within 8 business days, approved within 5 business days of the next meeting; the full rules are in our minutes deadlines guide). Once approved, they become the version of history a court, an auditor, or a resident fifty years from now will rely on. That is why the schedules treat them differently from nearly everything else a clerk produces.
Two neighboring rules are easy to confuse with this one, and both have much shorter clocks: the audio or video recording of the meeting (which may be destroyed the day after minutes are approved; see our recordings answer) and closed-session minutes (a special one-year-and-one-day rule; see the closed-session answer). The permanence applies to approved open-session minutes.
Dekree drafts minutes from your meeting recording, walks them through proposed and approved status on the statutory clock, publishes them to your public portal, and keeps the permanent record attached to the meeting it documents. The retention rule is applied automatically from the official schedule.
Every quote above links to the exact page of the official schedule on michigan.gov, and every series is in our free searchable database of all 2,149 Michigan retention rules. Retention periods are minimums that authorize disposal, holds override them, and your municipal attorney has the final word; the full framework is in our records retention guide.
Permanently. General Schedule #35 (Administrative Records), which applies to every Michigan public body, lists Meeting Records for public body open meetings as PERMANENT (item 35.116). The township clerk schedule says the same: GS #25 item 25.200, Meeting Minutes, Open Sessions, PERMANENT. Approved minutes are the official record of a public body’s decisions and are never eligible for destruction.
Effectively yes. General Schedule #2 (Michigan Public Schools) item 2.0200 says Board of Education open-session meeting records are retained until the school district is dissolved and then transferred to the Archives of Michigan, so the record survives even the district itself.
The permanent record is the approved minutes. Michigan’s Open Meetings Act separately requires proposed minutes within 8 business days of a meeting and approved minutes within 5 business days of the next meeting, and the approved version is what the retention schedules preserve forever.
This article is educational information for Michigan public bodies, current as of the publication date. It is not legal advice, and statutes and court decisions change. Confirm specifics with your municipal attorney. Statute text: legislature.mi.gov.