Steven Brown is the executive director of American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island Inc. Recently, the ACLU released a report that found that while most city and town councils and school committees across the state continue to livestream and archive meetings in a post-COVID-19 environment, some public bodies do not. The report also found that a few public governing bodies were continuing to make remote public participation available as it had occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Brown spoke to Providence Business News about the report, its findings and how the ACLU plans to encourage all municipalities to have open remote access to meetings.
PBN: Did the idea of creating this report come from community members or did the ACLU want to see for itself?
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BROWN: We monitor school committee meetings and city and town council meetings when issues crop up. We noticed there were very different approaches that public bodies were demonstrating when it comes to whether the public was able to remotely access or participate in meetings. After seeing that, we thought it would be useful to do this survey and see how things were operating across the board.
PBN: What was your overall reaction to the findings in the report?
BROWN: The good part is that we found a large number of school committees and city and town councils were continuing to livestream and record their meetings. Also, they’re still making their agenda packets available online. On the other hand, it was very disappointing to see that some of these public bodies had completely eliminated the livestreaming and recording that had been going on for years during the pandemic. That happened with ease. So, seeing it eliminated was disappointing. There were also very few public bodies continuing to allow remote participation by members of the public. We certainly would like to see that increased.
PBN: Were there any specific cities or towns you were surprised that you had thought would continue recording meetings and allowing remote participation but weren’t?
BROWN: We did not have any presuppositions about who would be doing what. One thing that did come out clearly [from the report] is that the size of the community did not matter in terms of their willingness and eagerness to promote public participations. There were big and small communities that were on our list that met all four of the metrics that we were measuring [watch meetings remotely, participate in meetings remotely, access archived recordings of the meetings and review agenda packets remotely]. That indicates to me that public bodies should be able to do all of these things.
PBN: Have the public bodies said to you why they are not recording meetings or allowing remote public participation in those cases?
BROWN: No, but the survey was not set up that way. We did our survey based on the agendas they are required to post online. We weren’t trying to ask them for reasons. We just wanted to get the information out there and hopefully get some peer pressure to maybe encourage some of these municipal bodies that are not doing all they should to begin doing it.
PBN: There was a proposed bill in the R.I. Senate that would require municipalities to record and post meetings and allow remote public participation. While the bill is still being considered, do you plan to reach out to individual municipalities to encourage them to make remote participation a reality?
BROWN: First, we did send a copy of the report to each of the municipalities, school districts, and the city and town administrators to both see what we put together and judge for themselves whether they should be doing more – which is what we encourage them to do.
We also told them we plan on updating this report on a regular basis, and we encourage the public bodies to let us know if they changed their policies in any way. We want to make note of it and give credit to those that make remote access easier for the public.
Regarding the legislation, there was a truncated House version of this bill introduced and passed by the House. There are two aspects of the bill, one has to do with certain advisory bodies to meet remotely themselves while giving the public access as well. The key part would require major public bodies to livestream and record their meetings. The House bill that was passed only addressed advisory committees.
Open government groups encouraged the House to include the main part of the Senate bill, but they did not do that. I expect us to be back next year pressing for it [to be passed].
James Bessette is the PBN special projects editor, and also covers the nonprofit and education sectors. You may reach him at Bessette@PBN.com. You may also follow him on Twitter at @James_Bessette.
About time the ACLU finally did something that makes sense, even though it’s pretty much a no brainer.