Committee supports website posting but says failure to post should not invalidate meetings

The Charter Committee on May 18 reviewed proposed language governing procedures for multiple-member bodies and debated how strongly to tie legal validity to posting notices on the official town website.

Members expressed that the website is where most citizens look for notices and favored a requirement that the town clerk cause notice to be posted online, but they voiced concern that making website posting a legal condition could prevent legitimate meetings during technical outages. The committee coalesced around language that would require posting for transparency but explicitly state failure to post on the website should not prevent a meeting from taking place or invalidate actions taken when other proper notice channels (for example, the town bulletin board and the town clerk's processes) were followed.

Discussion also covered typical notification logistics: the practice of sending agenda packets 48 to 72 hours prior to meetings, potential deletion of outdated boilerplate language requiring delivery of notice to a member's residence or place of business, and the town clerk's role in posting to the website. Members noted that the Select Board and town clerk's office control posting and the committee wanted to avoid creating an operational trap where a civic-technology outage (for example, a hosting provider failure) would invalidate municipal business.

Next steps: the committee will adopt clarified text that preserves website posting as the expected primary notice mechanism but protects against invalidation during technical failures; the provision will be noted in the committee's handoff report for the Select Board and town counsel review.