Mary Byrne
Sunshine Week — celebrated the week of March 16 each year — is unlikely to appear on your kitchen or Google calendar.
But for those who have it on their radar, it’s an opportunity to shed light on the importance of open government and government transparency.
That means government bodies post meeting agendas, provide access to public records, and ensure meeting minutes are posted in a timely manner. All public bodies — from the Select Board down to the subcommittees of different boards or committees — are subject to the state Open Meeting Law, guiding the expectations for an open government.
“It’s an obligation of every committee to file minutes in a timely way,” said Select Board Chair Roy Epstein. “When they don’t, two things happen: one is that members of the public don’t know what the committee is doing, and second when time goes by, it gets very hard to reconstruct the minutes because meetings aren’t generally recorded, so it becomes difficult to create really appropriately detailed minutes.”
At a meeting on Feb. 5, Epstein highlighted a handful of boards and committees that have demonstrated a particularly “unacceptable lag” in posting minutes. Those included the Community Preservation Committee; the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee; the Energy Committee; the Housing Trust; the Human Rights Commission; and the Structural Change Implementation Committee (SGIC).
Some of those committees have begun to catch up with their required postings.
Open Meeting Law requires public bodies to create and approve minutes within the next three public body meetings or 30 days from the meeting date, whichever is later unless the public body can show good cause for further delay.
Sometimes, meeting minutes for local boards or committees have been up to a year behind.
“If you let it slip, then suddenly it’s not just the burden of doing multiple sets of minutes, but people don’t recall what was discussed at a prior meeting, and the whole process breaks down,” Epstein said at the February meeting.
Reasons for delay vary. For example, in the case of the Community Preservation Committee — whose last posted minutes were from August 2023, despite holding multiple meetings through last month — Select Board member Elizabeth Dionne noted that the board’s administrative assistant is also a budget analyst working on three budgets this year.
“It’s an issue, and at the same time, there are some extenuating circumstances there,” she said, acknowledging a year without posted minutes is “egregious.”
SGIC Chair Paul Rickter said the delay in posting minutes in a timely manner was in part due to the changing nature of the chair’s position since meetings began being held on Zoom.
“In pre-COVID days, it was easier for the chair to write the minutes on a laptop during the meeting,” Rickter said in a statement. “Now, in the era of Zoom, the chair is typically the Zoom host and is distracted waiting to see if a member of the public has entered the waiting room.”
He said the committee is working on addressing the issue.
Town Administrator Patrice Garvin said the lag in posting minutes isn’t necessarily unique to Belmont.
Dionne added that a failure to comply with the Open Meeting Law “can get us into trouble” — even negating a committee’s actions if not followed.
Recently, the Select Board questioned a Retirement Board vote, claiming the board failed to disclose a planned vote on its agenda, which is required by that law.
Epstein asked Garvin to contact all Select Board-appointed committees, of which there are dozens, and inform them that all members must be up-to-date on ethics training and have all overdue meeting minutes posted within two months.
The next steps are still being determined, he said.
“It’s a real issue, I agree. It’s a transparency issue,” Select Board member Mark Paollilo said. “It’s important for our community, for those individuals who have an interest in knowing what these committees are working on.”
Epstein said that in addition to pushing for meeting minutes to be posted, he has also talked to Garvin about requiring all members to complete an Open Meeting Law training.
