Web site law is stress on towns

Connecticut’s municipalities, as of Oct. 1, are required to post minutes of town boards and commissions on their Web sites within seven days of the minuted meetings. An ethics reform bill passed in the last Legislative session included an amendment, added shortly before the state House and Senate votes, which requires the online posting of such minutes. This is a difficult change, especially for those towns which are not technologically advanced, or have volunteers taking and posting minutes for any portion of the town’s business.

Before this law took effect, minutes were required to be posted at a town hall seven days after the minuted meeting. Any of the public could visit the town hall and view the draft minutes, which would not be formally approved by the board affected until its next meeting, usually a month later. It’s quite a leap for many towns to take, from simply posting typed minutes on a bulletin board in the town hall to posting them online on the town’s Web site.

Part of the problem is that legislators must have believed that all municipalities already have Web sites that are complete, active and updated regularly. This is not the case, as outlined in this newspaper in a Sept. 18 article by Karen Bartomioli. And since the state has not mandated that town governments have Web sites, legislators should not have expected all to have undertaken a project as costly and time-consuming as setting up and administrating a useful and interactive Web site. As it is, the state’s municipalities are inconsistent in their approaches to the appearance, site addresses and general information available on the Web sites that do exist.

North Canaan’s Web site, for example, has never been in regular use, and the town’s selectmen decided to take down the site rather than risk a lack of compliance with the law. It is understandable if the selectmen were frustrated with a mandate that offered no funding or other support to help municipalities comply, and that assumed a certain level of expertise in technology. But it’s also clear that online communication is now the way of the world, and that will not change any time soon.

It does make sense for municipal government to expand its reach to more citizens than simply those who visit the town halls on a regular basis. Openness is not only good for government and for the governed, it is required by the state’s Freedom of Information Law. Easy and timely access to minutes of open meetings could greatly help general communication among those who are affected by any issues discussed at those meetings. Of course, as pointed out by Dan McGuinness, executive director of the Northwestern Connecticut Council of Governments, in an interview with Bartomioli, any small glitch in setting up a working system of posting the minutes online on a timely basis could also cause problems, such as creating the possibility of using such an error as a technicality to advance a decision in a land use court case.

State Sen. Andrew Roraback (R-30), who voted in favor of the bill, told this newspaper that he believes the mandate will likely be changed in the next Legislative session, but short of that, he will look into whether there could be a delay in implementation, giving the towns an extra year or even two to comply with the new law. This could be helpful to the towns in the Northwest Corner, including North Canaan, Kent and Falls Village, that have a way to go before they have a stable and consistent approach to administering a municipal Web site.

If the state would like its 169 municipalities to be able to offer this service, it would be helpful if there were a resource available at the state level to give towns a template to use in building their Web sites. Why not a statewide model site that towns without working Web sites could use, which would be consistent in format, creating better ease of use for the public and for those who administrate the sites? Or is this kind of cooperation too much to hope for in anything related to government?

If this law stands, let’s hope that at the least some kind of technical support at the state level can be offered in complying with this mandate. For small towns like those in the Northwest Corner, whose budgets will be shrinking in the face of a recession economy, spending extra money to build Web sites and administrate them could mean diverting limited funds and energies from other important ongoing needs.