Sunshine Week: How area towns, cities stack up on access to executive session records
As part of the Telegram & Gazette’s Sunshine Week coverage focused on access to public documents, the newspaper took a look at access to executive session minutes that cities, towns and school departments had already ordered released.
Once disclosure no longer defeats the purpose of an executive session, minutes and other records from the session must be disclosed unless they fall within an exemption to the Public Records Law, or the attorney-client privilege applies.
The state Open Meeting Law requires that existing executive session minutes be made available within 10 days of a request, whether they have been approved or remain in draft form.
The newspaper asked about a dozen cities, towns and school departments for their released executive session minutes from 2017 to 2018.
Experiences ran the gamut. A limited number of municipalities already posted the minutes on their websites. Others allowed a reporter to look at the minutes while at the counter. Others told us to make a formal records request, activating the 10-day timeline.
Gardner posts its City Council-approved executive session minutes to its website, but the most recent was from a December 2017 session.
In an interview, Gardner City Clerk Alan L. Agnelli said he had the sense there are other executive session minutes that the city could release, but it’s the council’s final call. Mr. Agnelli said he intends to meet with Council President Scott J. Graves to discuss the matter.
With big rezoning and other consuming matters, it was busy last year for Gardner, and the council president was relatively new to his role. In light of those factors, getting caught up on the release of executive session minutes might not have been a priority, the clerk suggested.
But before meeting with the Gardner council president, Mr. Agnelli said he first would like to call the state to get a few questions answered about timelines, and whether certain members might need to recuse themselves from approving the minutes.
He chuckled about the irony of potentially needing to call an executive session to review the status of executive session minutes.
Lawyer Jeffrey J. Pyle, a partner with Prince Lobel Tye in Boston, which advises media on First Amendment issues, suggested cities and towns often sit on executive session minutes and may not put a high priority on periodically reviewing those minutes as a matter of course.
There’s the tendency for cities and towns to not “really move to release executive session minutes until there’s a request for them,” Mr. Pyle said.
If the town refuses to release the minutes on request, there’s an attorney general office form on which the requester can make a formal complaint - first to the town and then, if that isn’t satisfied, to the AG’s office.
“I do find that the prospect of an attorney general’s office proceeding tends to get the attention of many cities and towns about what they need to do with regard to their open meeting minutes,” Mr. Pyle said.
Auburn municipal and school departments provided quick access upon request for their approved executive session minutes.
Asked why she hadn’t asked for a formal records request, Ms. Kemp said that it’s the town’s practice to provide documents on the spot to customers if it doesn’t require extensive review.
The minutes contained a notation that the board chairman had released the minutes Jan. 9 of this year. On why it took so long to release the minutes, Chairman Doreen M. Goodrich said that she had to wait for a third board member to sign them, similar to the board having a quorum for an open session.
Ms. Goodrich said the board’s administrative assistant is diligent in reminding members that they need to sign executive session minutes that are ready to be released to the public.
Ms. Goodrich added that the board doesn’t have any outstanding executive session minutes. She said it has two open and pending legal matters for which the minutes cannot yet be released.
At the Auburn School Department, Ailaine Zautner, who takes minutes for the School Committee, said executive session minutes could be viewed by appointment. The next day, Ms. Zautner sent an email stating the minutes were ready to be looked at. She provided a binder of executive session minutes from the past nine years.
Tantasqua Regional School District in Sturbridge wasn’t able to provide the minutes by week’s end.
In Southbridge, executive secretary to the town manager Yvonne Tortis told the newspaper the handling of the council’s executive session minutes hadn’t necessarily taken “precedence,” in view of other work that keeps her busy.
It appeared that Mrs. Tortis tried to accommodate. At first she suggested the newspaper make a formal records request. But she later changed her mind, stating she would make a good-faith effort to review the minutes later in the week. She said she would allow the newspaper to look at them the following week.
The Southbridge council’s executive session minutes are seldom requested, Mrs. Tortis said in response to a question. “I’ve had none,” she said. “None at all.”
She then opined that by the time executive session minutes had been approved for release, the information is “old news” because “everything that’s been in executive session has come out in open session.”
In Hardwick, Town Clerk Paula Roberts asked the publication to make the request via email, explaining she wanted to forward it to the town administrator.
“It just so happened they haven’t filed those with me yet, but the Board of Selectmen voted that they can be released to the public,” she said.
In Holden, a town official asked why the paper wanted the minutes, and what they would be used for before stating the office would need to review the minutes before their release.
For instance, in an ongoing civil lawsuit filed by a Webster police sergeant, the town posted to its website information about an executive session selectmen held Oct. 5, 2018.
The minutes indicated a difference of opinion between the town’s insurance lawyer and town counsel.
The former indicated there would be a “risk” in proceeding to trial, while town counsel said there wasn’t a calculated risk and expressed comfort with the town’s position, according to the minutes.
Courtney Friedland, who writes minutes for Webster selectmen, said town officials want her to write executive session minutes with the same degree of detail as regular board meeting minutes.
“I think, because we have so many hot topics, that a lot of the selectmen like to have a lot of detail in them, of what’s occurring and who made what comment,” she said last week.
Ms. Friedland also noted that “we have a gentlemen that loves to read the agendas, our minutes and our executive session minutes,” and “being vague does not fly with him.”
Mr. Higgins has filed multiple complaints to the state attorney generals office about Webster’s minutes, resulting in determinations against selectmen and the town.
Reached by phone, Mr. Higgins, a former chairman of Swansea’s recreation commission, said he reads agendas and minutes as a “hobby,” picks a city or town on which to focus and files complaints when he sees potential violations.
“Since 2010, I have been holding public bodies’ feet to the fire as it relates to the Open Meeting Law, both regular session and executive session minutes, and posting agendas,” he said.
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