Last May, resident Lynn Nadeau sponsored two laudable Town Meeting articles. One would have required town boards to record their meetings and post those recordings and/or minutes of those meetings on the town website. The other mandated universal adoption of so-called “hybrid” meetings, which would offer the option to attend and participate either in person or remotely.
On the recommendation of town counsel and a study committee formed as the result of an article Nadeau had proposed a year earlier, those articles got 11th-hour edits.
Those edits took what would have been binding propositions and made them advisory in nature. With a resounding affirmative vote by Town Meeting, those boards were instead urged to “undertake best efforts” to make meeting recordings available to the public and move in the direction of hybrid meetings.
A year later, what do those “best efforts” look like?
Color us unimpressed.
Best we can tell, little has changed. The boards and commissions that had already been committed to providing both in-person and remote attendance options have continued to offer them. But those who had been huddling in their technologically deficient home bases have extended that practice, too.
Nadeau told the Current she shares that assessment. “Territorialism” and a “lack of cooperation” have continued to frustrate the provision of easy access to public meetings, a necessary precursor to robust knowledge of and participation in town affairs.
We don’t dispute the findings of the study committee, which identified not only the technological shortcomings with Marblehead’s meeting spaces but also the added custodial and other costs associated with keeping those rooms open more often.
However, Nadeau is not wrong when she suggests that, in the 23rd wealthiest community in Massachusetts — and one that prides itself on being the place where the seeds of American democracy were sown — the current situation is simply unacceptable.
As the Boston Globe noted in a recent editorial, hybrid meeting access in Massachusetts is at something of a crossroads. Gov. Maura Healey’s wide-ranging Municipal Empowerment Act, which also includes provisions related to local-option hotel and meals taxes, “falls far short of a full-throated endorsement” of hybrid public meetings, which “could easily result in a whole lot of backsliding by municipalities.”
Under the governor’s bill, hybrid meetings would be allowed but not required.
That spells trouble, the ACLU Massachusetts, Disability Law Center, newspaper publishers’ associations and others told Healey in a Feb. 28 joint letter.
“Giving every government body covered under the [state’s Open Meeting Law] complete discretion about how to provide public access to their meetings means people with disabilities, parents with young children, people with limited transportation, and others will be completely shut out when city councils, select boards, or school committees decide to hold meetings exclusively in person,” they wrote.
Nadeau’s first choice — and ours, too — would be to take this decision out of local boards’ hands by passing H.3040/S.2024, which would make the provision of a remote attendance option mandatory.
The prospect of such a law is just another reason — not that one beyond fostering trust in government institutions through transparency should be necessary — that the town should find a way to invest in its remote meeting capacity, even during these challenging budgetary times.
The study committee called the $6,000 needed to outfit the Jacobi Community Center with hybrid technology a “debatable” expenditure of town funds due to “the lack of consistent availability of Recreation and Parks evening staff.” However, to us, that obstacle seems to be surmountable.
We will grant that expanding the use of the lower level of the Mary Alley Building, with its Americans With Disabilities Act accessibility issues, is more complicated — and expensive.
Nevertheless, between Abbot Hall, Abbot Library reopening in June and perhaps some limited use of the schools, the issue for some boards and commissions is less the availability of a facility with remote attendance capabilities and more a simple reluctance (or obstinance) to take their show on the road.
Progress with Nadeau’s other request — the recording of meetings and publishing of minutes — is even simpler, as we think we can demonstrate.
Our reporters tell us that they have been gobsmacked by how rapidly transcription software has improved. Give Microsoft Word or Otter.ai an audio file of decent quality, and within minutes — if not seconds — you will have a pretty darned accurate transcript. These programs can even distinguish between multiple speakers and denote that in the transcript (though you do have to give them a bit of help with the names).
We would like to run an experiment in government accountability. All we would need is one person with a smartphone in each “room where municipal business happens.” It could be a board member, or it could be a member of the public. The latter should follow the state’s Open Meeting Law guidance and notify the chair of the intent to record and comply with any reasonable requirements the chair imposes so as to not interfere with the meeting.
When the meeting starts, begin recording using the “voice memo” or similar app. When the meeting is over, send us the audio file. We will generate a transcript, inserting the names and fixing obvious errors, create “minutes” from those transcripts and then publish everything — recording, transcript and minutes — to our website.
We make the same offer to boards that are meeting exclusively remotely. Record your Zoom, send us the audio file and/or transcript. We’ll do the rest.
Do we have any takers?
