TRURO — The process of keeping minutes of select board meetings and getting them approved and released slowed to a crawl last year, with minutes from late August and September being approved only this week. The Aug. 27 meeting minutes took four and a half months to be written and approved.
The minutes of three meetings in July and early August were approved in mid-November, with the July 9 minutes also having taken more than four months to be written and approved.
Select board chair Susan Areson raised the issue during the board’s Dec. 17 meeting and asked Town Manager Darrin Tangeman for an update. “I’m a little embarrassed because the last minutes were in August and so we’re really far behind,” she said.
Producing minutes is a basic government function required by the state’s Open Meeting Law. According to the state attorney general’s website, “Public bodies must create and approve minutes of all open session meetings in a timely manner,” which “will generally be considered to be within the next three public body meetings or within 30 days, whichever is later.”
For biweekly select board meetings, three subsequent meetings would often mean about 60 days, Tangeman told the Independent.
“Sixty days would generally place us about three meetings in draft as the fourth meeting is being approved,” he wrote in an email.
The select boards in Provincetown, Wellfleet, and Eastham routinely approve their minutes at the next public meeting, however. Executive assistants Amanda Perry, Rebekah Eldridge, and Kayla Urquhart, respectively, prepare select board minutes in those towns, and all three said they draft the minutes during the meeting and aim to submit them in time for review and approval at the next scheduled meeting.
“I don’t like to have a backlog of minutes, so I will always have the previous meeting minutes at the next meeting,” said Perry. “I try to make very transparent minutes because people have so many questions.”
“If you don’t turn them around quickly, then sometimes they are harder to get approved because people need to go back and reference what happened at the meeting,” said Urquhart. “It’s in everyone’s best interest to get it done before the next one.”
Minutes typically report public comments, motions, and votes. They do not relay discussions among select board members verbatim, but minute takers often note when a lengthy discussion occurred and summarize the outcome.
A Shifting Responsibility
In an email, Tangeman wrote that the responsibility for writing the Truro minutes has shifted among multiple staff members recently, and that he began a push to comply with state guidelines for the minutes in August.
Alex Powers, whose title is “board and committee support staff,” had been responsible for taking minutes for several committees and had agreed in September to refocus his efforts on the backlog of select board meetings, Tangeman wrote. At the time, Powers cited the “unusual number of very important” select board meetings and their length as an issue, Tangeman wrote.
By Dec. 1, however, Powers said he could no longer work on select board minutes but would continue handling other boards. Tangeman did not explain that change, and Powers did not respond to emails from the Independent.
In December, Nicole Tudor became acting town clerk after Elizabeth Verde left that position. Town clerks are the official custodian of minutes for all public bodies after they are approved.
On Dec. 4, Tangeman reassigned the responsibility for the select board minutes to newly hired community preservation committee coordinator Robin Huibregtse, he told the select board on Dec. 17.
He would approve her working “even beyond the normal hours, to see if she can get caught up,” he said.
At the board’s Jan. 14 meeting, minutes for the Aug. 27, Sept. 10, and Sept. 24 regular meetings and a Sept. 10 work session were approved — all marked as prepared by Huibregtse.
Areson said that she thought Huibregtse had done a thorough job — but that she nonetheless had sent a “very long list” of proposed additions to the minutes to Tudor, Executive Assistant Noelle Scoullar, and Assistant Town Manager Kelly Clark. “Some of them were minor and some of them were substantive,” Areson said.
Minutes for six regular meetings and three work sessions between Oct. 8 and Dec. 17 are still incomplete.
Tudor told the Independent this week that the town is “actively working” to complete those remaining sets of minutes. Tangeman wrote that he had directed Tudor to begin the process of hiring a consultant to produce the remaining minutes.
The aim is to complete them no later than the board’s first meeting in February, he added. He had discussed his plan to bring on outside help with Areson in early January, he wrote, and she had left the decision to him.
“We’re trying to do everything we can with staff to get the minutes complete,” said Tangeman in a phone call this week.
