First off, my sincere apologies for the delay in writing this week — work has taken me offline and out of town for much of the last week. The good news is that there is some cool new content in the pipeline, including a video tour of the Belmont PD that I hope to post in the coming days, for those of you who missed the BPD tour earlier in the year.
In the meantime, I wanted to weigh in on what I think is an important issue — and one that directly effects BloggingBelmont’s audience, namely: the Board of Selectmen’s new policy on responding to e-mail inquiries from voters. If you didn’t read it in the Citizen Herald, here’s the scoop: the Selectmen have decided that they will no longer respond directly to email correspondents and have cited the State’s open meeting laws as a reason. The open meeting laws are a complex beast, and I don’t want to bore you with it here, so I’ve broken out a discussion about them and you can read it here.
The long and short of this issue is that Belmont’s Selectman are using a very expansive interpretation of the open meeting laws to bolster their decision to stop e-mail communications. According to Selectmen Firenze, e-mail exchanges with constituents in town may inadvertently violate the law because they can be circulated freely. If communications contain information about a Selectman’s position on an issue before the board, and if they fall under the gaze of a fellow Selectman, they could constitute an illegal quorum of the Board in which deliberations on the public matter were taking place outside of the public’s eye. They believe this is true, even if the e-mail was read inadvertently, or posted in a public forum, as with the e-mail message from Dan LeClerc that I posted to B2 back in February.
According the BCH article, “Because there are only three members of the board, two of them make a quorum, and it is illegal for a quorum of a governmental body to discuss matters of policy outside of a meeting open to the public. Once a selectman responds to an e-mail from a constituent, the content of that e-mail is out of their hands, and has the potential to reach another board member.”
What’s the solution? In short, e-mail communication between voters and Selectmen is now going to be a one-way street. Under the new policy “Instead of responding individually to constituents, the board will forward all the e-mails they receive about matters of town policy to the Board of Selectmen’s Office, where an automated message will respond with an explanation of the board’s e-mail policy.”
After that, it gets complicated. “Town Administrator Tom Younger and Assistant Town Administrator Jeff Conti will draft the response message before the board votes it into policy. It will explain that the board does not respond to individual e-mails, but that the communication has been received. It will then be included in the packet circulated to each member before a meeting, and will be entered as part of the public record.”
These machinations would all be understandable if the mandate were coming as the result of a voter lawsuit, from the State or even from the Town’s legal counsel. But it isn’t. In fact, this new policy was cooked up by the Selectmen without direct input from the town’s legal advisers. It’s a confusing situation but let me sum it up this way, based on a phone conversation with Selectman Firenze shortly after the article was published:
1) There is some hazy language in the open meetings laws, which are certainly not clear on the status of e-mail conversations, given that e-mail didn’t exist outside of classified government labs when the laws were passed in the mid 1970s. Think of it this way: nobody — but nobody — is suggesting that one elected official inadvertently reading the thoughts of another elected official in an email thread or as its posted on a Web site constitutes an illegal quorum under the open meetings law — but it doesn’t NOT say that either. The Selectmen have not asked for the legal opinion of the Town’s counsel on this because, in short, that would cost the town money.
2) The Selectmen have been using personal computers to conduct official business for the town, including sending and receiving e-mail from their personal e-mail accounts. This does seem to be an area of concern. Selectmen Firenze cites a Massachusetts Municipal Association position paper that personal computers should not be used for official business. We haven’t seen that position paper (we’re asking for it), but that sounds like a reasonable prohibition.
3) The town has offered to buy the Selectmen laptops to work and email on so they can stop using their personal computers, but Mr. Firenze and Mr. Soloman were not interested because that would cost the town money, and because they don’t relish having to drag them back and forth to Town Hall with them.
4) The current email setup, in which messages sent to the Selectmen’s e-mail address gets copied to all three Selectmen is sub optimal. First of all, it’s not working because there’s no way to coordinate who responds to those emails and what gets said, and second of all because the Selectmen get a lot of email and it takes time to respond to them. Finally, the current setup doesn’t work because email is easy to pass along and because its often hard to discern tone or intent from written email messages.
So that’s the reasoning. My take on this? I think that, in matters of public policy, Hippocrates ancient maxim “first, do no harm” should apply. And, in this case, I think that harm is being done. First of all, there’s a significant amount of discussion within Belmont that happens online, whether its in Yahoo groups or person to person. It’s 2008, so I don’t need to get analytic about how critical email communications are. It’s just a fact. Second, there’s a significant population of residents, especially those who work outside of town, who use e-mail and the Internet as a primary means of staying in touch with town affairs and getting their voice heard. To these people, the Selectmen are saying “you can talk, but we can’t discuss.” Other residents who choose to write letters, phone call or go to in person meetings get a different standard of service, and that’s not fair.
Finally, I just think its kind of nutty that three paid employees of the town are, in essence, saying that they want to be excepted from using a standard tool of modern organizations: the personal computer. I think it’s entirely reasonable for the town to purchase laptops for the Selectmen to use in the course of business, and to help them keep their private and public roles separate. The Selectmen need to meet the town half way and agree to use the laptops. The Rube Goldberg machine of an email response policy sounds complicated and Tom Younger and Jeff Conti have better things to do with their days than forwarding emails around and assembling printouts for the Selectmen’s meeting. Frankly, complaining about having to lug the devices to and fro, or the burden of keeping separate systems will ring hollow to the countless white collar professionals in town who do this every day and who wouldn’t dream of telling their employer “no thanks” when presented with a company standard laptop or desktop to do their job.
My 2c. You can register your displeasure (or your support) for the new policy by emailing them at: selectmen@town.belmont.ma.us.
The illegal quorum problem is not completely hypothetical. I’ve worked in a distributed company, where many tricky technical issues would get ironed out (among three people, just like our selectmen) over email. One possibility might be to have emails to/from the selectmen automatically published, and have all interactions occur completely and obviously in public. You’d want to use an email address like selectmen-open-record so that anyone sending mail would have some clue that their email would be published.
The laptops issue is a tricky one. People I know who use laptops, quickly find themselves doing everything on a single laptop, and a separate laptop for work and a separate laptop for personal use would be inconvenient. However, people generally use separate personal and work email accounts, so that those are not mixed. If the public/private use of the laptop can be ironed out, not spending the money is false economy; everywhere I’ve worked, greater email connectivity speeds interaction, and the automatic recording of correspondence in a form I can review and search is a big help.
Great points — and thanks for writing. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the Selectmen e-mailing each other to iron out their differences wouldn’t violate the open meeting laws. Clearly it would.
But this is about them communicating to constituents who email about a pressing issue — say Full Day K or the New Wellington. I guess the issue of “illegal quorum” boils down to this: does the State really mean to say that Selectmen should not discuss their positions on public matters with constituents before a consensus has been reached? If not (and I don’t think that was the intent of the open meeting laws) then e-mail shouldn’t be held to a different standard than any other form of communication…and it is! Mr. Firenze suggested in our conversation that he was overwhelmed by the volume of email he was getting. I think its totally reasonable for him to use an auto respond e-mail and say “I get a lot of email and can’t reply to every one, but thanks for writing!” Then respond to the messages that he thinks warrant it, or that he likes, or whatever filter he wants to use.
It’s more problematic to say “because you emailed, the law prevents me from responding. If you want to talk, come see me in person.” That’s just not fair or, I think, honest given what the Open Meeting laws really say and require.
As for the work/home thing…there are many ways to get around this problem. How about a VPN connection into a town computer that would allow them to work from home but keep the two systems separate? Web based work e-mail? I mean, this is a problem (telecommuting) that has been encountered and solved by most companies of even modest size. It sounds like the Selectmen are doing a fair amount of work and communicating via the Internet, it makes sense for the town to furnish them with equipment to do it.
I’ve used VPNs, and I loathe them. My brother reports a similar experience using VPN. At my current job, one of the biggest off-hours productivity improvements was putting our mail servers outside the corporate firewall, so we didn’t need to do the VPN handshake.
There’s not much difference between web-based work email, and IMAP-accessed email from Eudora, Thunderbird, or Apple Mail, except that IMAP tends to work better.
It occurred to me that a Wiki might work better. People often have the same questions, that way they could get answered once (what the heck are the 40B rules? How does prop 2.5 work? What “great ideas” are we legally prevented from trying? Why can’t we have more stop signs? Whatever happened to that tunnel we were going to put under the train tracks at Alexander Avenue?)
David: a wiki is a great idea. I’m still wondering about that tunnel.
Paul: Would it, hypothetically, solve the open meetings problem if all email between selectmen and constituents was posted somewhere public? I suppose all the selectmen would have to read all of it, which might be a trial to them, but I feel we ought to press them to do *something* — this no email policy is just lame.
Hey David, Beth. Sheesh — I just got an email back from Middlesex County Assistant DA Robert Bender. I’m afraid the policy as they’ve outlined it may actually be well founded. Seems like the DA is taking a pretty tough stance on the whole email communication thing. A Wiki is one approach — but that destroys the anonymity of the communication for the constituent. My hope was that we could just roll back this policy and allow constituents to continue to email with town officials but it seems like the law, as its currently being interpreted, won’t allow for that.
[...] fear they might violate the State’s Open Meeting Laws. I blogged at length about the issue in this post on April 14, so I won’t bore you with the details again. Suffice it to say that the main concern was that [...]
I think that anonymity is overrated on the internet. First, it’s not clear that it really exists, if you are worried about “them” coming after you for your revolutionary postings. Second, you get all sorts of antisocial, unproductive junk. At best, misinformation and spamming, at worst, threats and posted links to malware and illegal materials (stuff that is illegal even if viewed by accident and stored in your browser’s cache).
There’s tons of stuff “about” Belmont that is not exactly related to town government, that needs to be recorded or explained somewhere. The way that Prop 2.5 changes taxes when different houses change values at differing rates is very non-intuitive (say, if 2-families become much more popular, their taxes will increase faster than 2.5% per year, where single-family homes could even see a decrease). As another example, to hear people talking about property values (in general) as if that caused their taxes to rise, points to a fundamental misunderstanding — if all our property doubles in value, the taxes DO NOT double — instead the rate comes down, so that the total increase is only 2.5%.
People need to understand both that there are some families in Belmont getting by on very little money, and that the property tax really does bite them; and also, that our RATE is very low, which means that anyone buying in Belmont sees the taxes as pretty much insignificant compared to their mortgage; and that we have very little room for tinkering with that. On the other hand, I recently found out that we already have discounted electric rates for low-income families (using a variety of sensible definitions of low-income), I think amounting to between $500 and $1000 per year, depending on electric use — I didn’t know that.
One thing I’d still like to know is whether commercial landlords must be charged a lower rate when their rentals are vacant (is that a state rule?) or if it could be held constant to give them a greater incentive to fill the space.
So, that’s just taxes. There’s trash and recycling contracts, drainage, traffic, etc.