Public meeting notices to remain on City Hall bulletin board

A resolution to use Waltham’s website as the official mode of posting public meetings was tabled at the City Council’s Committee of the Whole meeting on Monday.

For now, a bulletin board at City Hall remains the official method of communication for public meetings.

The issue of how and where meetings are posted has been in the spotlight in recent months. 

Kathleen Luvisi, president of the League of Women Voters of Waltham, wrote a guest column in The Waltham Times on March 27, taking issue with the city’s use of a bulletin board behind City Hall for public meeting postings.

Luvisi wrote that Mayor Jeannette A. McCarthy, as the city’s chief executive officer,  has the authority to adopt the resolution to use the city’s website and urged her to do so to make meeting updates more accessible.

Councilor-at-Large Colleen Bradley-MacArthur voiced similar sentiments last year.

“The power to make that change rests with the executive office of each municipality,” Bradley-MacArthur told the City Council last May 13 when presenting the resolution.

But McCarthy on Monday said that the matter was not entirely under her control.

“I cannot control the legislative branch’s publication requirements of their zoning ordinances, special permits, those have a special statutory background that I’m not gonna get into about that,” she said.

According to the Massachusetts Open Meeting Law, municipalities can opt to use a website as the official posting method of public meetings, but the chief executive officer or mayor needs to sign off on it and inform the state’s attorney general of the change.

McCarthy said that she had spoken to various department heads and asked them to ensure that agendas and meeting materials are given to the city’s webmaster as soon as possible.

As it stands, Waltham is in compliance with the Open Meeting Law’s requirements for meeting postings. The law states that local bodies must post meeting information in a location that can be viewed by the public during all hours of the day and also be posted in the same building where the municipality’s clerk works.

But Waltham is part of a minority of municipalities still using physical postings as the official means of communication. According to the Office of the Attorney General, only 106 of the state’s 353 municipalities have yet to switch to a website as the official notice-posting location for local bodies.