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Trainer warns Harwich officials: social media, email and compiled rankings can trigger open-meeting issues
Summary
Michelle Randello advised that social media threads, email exchanges, and third-party compilations of members' opinions can create deliberative records and potentially violate the open meeting law if they amount to group deliberation.
Randello told attendees to be mindful of Facebook groups, closed threads and compiled rankings of member priorities because such exchanges can be treated as deliberations under the open meeting law. She recommended that officials who speak on social platforms make clear they are speaking as private citizens, and that staff use static pages on the town website to provide official information rather than engaging in back-and-forth social posts.
She cautioned that a single member posting an opinion that is copied to multiple members can reach a quorum and be interpreted as a deliberation, and that compiling board members' rankings or opinions in a single document before the meeting can run afoul of AG decisions. "We have been fairly successful in defending public officials' rights... including on social media, but we've still had to deal with the complaints," she said, urging caution and consultation with staff when controversial topics arise.
