Fagnant flap led to ACLU report

Zoning board member’s complaint inspired civil liberties group study on open meeting violations

WOONSOCKET – The American Civil Liberties Union Monday proposed an extensive series of legislative reforms to the state Open Meetings Act that the agency says resulted from a survey inspired by a single violation of the government transparency law lodged against the City Council last October.

The violation upheld a complaint brought against the council by Zoning Board member Richard Fagnant for bringing up his activities on social media under an agenda item opaquely referenced as “good and welfare.” The office of the attorney general said the heading was too vague to comply with the OMA’s requirements for advance public notice of topics to be discussed at public meetings.

“The opinion highlights the recurring nature of this particular problem of inadequate and non-specific agenda items,” said Steve Brown, executive director of the ACLU. “After reviewing the opinion we though it would be a good idea to look and see how prevalent the problem is.”

The violation prompted the ACLU to scan the agendas of every public meeting in the state that were scheduled to take place during the week of Oct. 5-9 – the same week the attorney general issued the now-infamous “good and welfare” ruling.

“Hidden Agendas: Violations of the Open Meets Act’s Public Notice Requirements,” a 19-page report built on the results of the survey, was released Monday by the ACLU. It documents widespread violations of the OMA among public bodies across the state, particularly among fire districts.

The study recommends nine legislative changes for tightening up the OMA, which Brown says hasn’t been subjected to a comprehensive legislative overhaul in nearly 20 years. He says the ACLU will be meeting with Access Rhode Island, a coali- tion of open government advocacy groups, about petitioning lawmakers to initiate the process.

“We expect to have bills introduced this session,” Brown said.

The recommendations include:

- Increasing the minimum advance notification time for publicly posting agendas from 48 to 72 hours and eliminating Saturdays and Sundays as part of the lead time. The latter provision is especially important, the ACLU says, for public bodies that hold meetings on Mondays, such as the Woonsocket City Council.

- A prohibition on openended agenda items such as “old business” and “new business” or “good and welfare.”

- A requirement for all public bodies to post the minutes and complete audio recordings of their meetings with the Secretary of State’s Office. Currently, only state agencies and “quasi-public” bodies are required to post the minutes with the SOS, and there is no requirement for posting audio transcripts.

- In keeping with Access to Public Records Act – the state’s other linchpin of government transparency – the OMA should be beefed up to establish penalties for “reckless” violations of the law, not merely those that are “knowing and willful.”

The ACLU said it reviewed the agendas for 72 public meetings during the week of Oct. 5-9 and found an assortment of violations, including breaches of the mandatory 48-hour advance notification requirement and the failure to amply specify the items on the agenda.

“A review of just one week of public meeting agendas disclosed numerous violations of this critical component of the law,” the ACLU said. “Agendas were often vague, lacking critical information and at times entirely unhelpful.”

The net result “is to make it much harder for members of the public to know exactly what public bodies plan to discuss at their meeting and, therefore, for the public to fully participate...” the report says.

Among the OMA scofflaws cited in the ACLU report was the Burrillville Planning Board – for talking about the proposed Clear River power plant under an agenda item nebulously advanced as “other business.”

The Northern Rhode Island Conservation District “showed a creative way of being unhelpful – indeed incomprehensible – to most people” by advancing a number of agenda items using an “alphabet soup” of acronyms like “SRWEP” and “RIFCO” and “RC & D.”

The Pawtucket Board of Appeals also fell short by posting an entire agenda as: “Vote on Public Hearing from September 28, 2015 and Public Hearing on Housing Board of Review.” The agenda “does not even include a reference to a place or time for the meeting,” the ACLU said.

But the harshest criticism in the report was reserved for the fire districts. Fire district compliance was reviewed three years ago by the ACLU, using statistics provided by the attorney general. During 12 years, over 14 percent of some 112 OMA violations documented during the period were from fire district meetings.

The review for the agendas from October 2015 “only confirmed the insouciance with which fire districts approach their obligations under the OMA,” according to ACLU.

“Those who follow these issues closely know there is a special circle in open government hell reserved just for fire districts,” the organization said.