In her July rulings that the Wellfleet Select Board had violated the Open Meeting Law, Assistant Attorney General Carrie Benedon wrote that the discussion at the board’s June 27, 2023 executive session focused primarily on “the role of the Board’s Chair vis-à-vis the other four members; communications by Board members; and how the Board and the town could move forward productively.”
In other words, for more than three hours on that June evening the board talked almost exclusively about its own way of getting work done and, in particular, whether the chair, Ryan Curley, had acted improperly in taking unilateral action against a town employee.
The discussion took place in secret and was not recorded, even though meetings of town boards must be open to the public except under narrowly defined exceptions to the law. The exception, in this case, was “to hear complaints against a public official or employee.”
Were there any such complaints?
According to Curley and Town Counsel Carolyn Murray, the closed meeting was called to hear complaints against Town Administrator Rich Waldo. But during the meeting, according to minutes that have now been released under state orders, it became clear that there was no complaint about Waldo. In fact, the complaints were about the way the select board and especially chair Curley behaved. Town staff felt unsupported and alarmed by a lack of civility and a general atmosphere of chaos at board meetings. Almost without exception, they supported Waldo in his efforts to right a badly listing ship.
Attorney Murray, who is no fool, must have felt very uncomfortable on June 27. She has been practicing municipal law for more than 20 years, and she conducts seminars on the Open Meeting Law. Surely she realized during the meeting that the official reason she had endorsed for the executive session was a sham, that Curley’s attempt to get rid of Waldo was illegitimate, and that by failing to verify the basis for the closed meeting she had placed the town in jeopardy.
Murray could have confronted Curley, acknowledged her own failure, and halted the illegal closed session. Instead, she allowed it to continue and then approved and defended the near-total censoring of the minutes.
The select board’s Barbara Carboni, also a lawyer, still defends Murray, arguing that the secrecy and censorship were justified by the personnel exception in the law. The state has rejected that claim, though, and anyone reading those minutes will see that Benedon was right to order their release.
There was one break in the fog: On Oct. 25, in another closed session, the board reviewed the June 27 minutes. In that review, Mike DeVasto “made it clear that he thought the minutes should be released and not redacted,” according to the Oct. 25 minutes, now also public. DeVasto felt that censorship “would make the public think the board was trying to hide something…. He feels we should be transparent with the public, so they understand what happened at that meeting.”
What the board was trying to hide was its own dysfunction. The lawyers, unfortunately, weren’t paying attention.
