If you believed what some members of the Board of Selectmen have claimed about the Massachusetts Open Meeting Law over the past year, you might think it really ought to be called the “Closed Meeting Law” instead. This began with the ridiculous assertion that the latest revision of the Open Meeting Law required the Selectmen to drop the “Open Forum” item that for over two decades have provided citizens with an opportunity to bring up any issues of concern to them from the agenda. It did not. More recently it was claimed, by Chairman Shawn Dahlen and Selectman Ted Flynn, that Selectman, Chris Donato was “in possible violation” of the Open Meeting Law because he tried to discuss an item that Dahlen did not want to discuss. Flynn’s dark mutterings about possibly filing ethics complaints against Donato for his supposed transgressions were duly and uncritically echoed in some local press reports.

Donato, however, was in violation of nothing. In fact, if anyone should be charged with transgressions, Dahlen and Flynn should be charged with intentionally misrepresenting the Open Meeting Law in an attempt to turn it from what it is meant to be, a measure to ensure greater transparency in local government, into a means to obscure matters, to muzzle discussion, and to stifle debate of topics they just do not want to talk about.

The intent of the law is to ensure that deliberations of government bodies do not take place in back rooms and behind closed doors. It requires posting an agenda that includes topics that the chairman “reasonably expects” to come up for discussion during the meeting. It does not, however, forbid bringing up or discussing topics that are not explicitly on the agenda, as Dahlen and Flynn recently claimed. To the contrary, guidelines on the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Web site explicitly state:

May our public body list a section for ‘New Business’ to cover topics which come up for the first time at the meeting in the meeting notice?

“Yes, this category may be used for topics that the Chair did not reasonably anticipate for discussion when filing the meeting notice to be posted. Some public bodies use this to category for their public comment or open forum periods. The best practice would be to explicitly state in the notice that the time is being reserved for topics that the chair did not reasonably anticipate would be discussed.”

There should regularly be both an “Open Forum” at the start of each meeting of the Board of Selectman as well as a “New Business” section toward the end of it, to ensure that the meeting really is open to the discussion of all matters of concern or interest to Duxbury’s citizens.

Dahlen and Flynn owe Chris Donato an apology. Duxbury’s citizens and taxpayers should make it very clear to the Board of Selectmen that twisting the Open Meeting Law into a tool to keep meetings closed and to avoid discussion of controversial topics is not acceptable behavior on the part of our elected representatives. We deserve better than that.