Dianna Hu finds it ironic that she first attended a public meeting during the pandemic, a time when people were stuck in isolation and buildings were closed.
Hu, who works full time as a software engineer, had never been able to attend because of her busy work schedule and the challenge of getting to city hall as a wheelchair user. She believes cities’ and towns’ public meetings — which decide issues affecting everyday life, such as building a new train station, more affordable housing or how to use local land — should remain accessible to residents who can’t attend in person.
“Whether you are sitting in a wheelchair, whether you are with a chronic health condition that makes it difficult to get out of bed, or whether you’re a caregiver, whether you’re a parent, every member of the public deserves to have access to the meetings that are defining the way our government runs, the way that our society runs,” said Hu, the chairperson of the Boston Center for Independent Living’s board of trustees.
In Massachusetts, communities are allowed — but not required — to hold hybrid public meetings. The state’s Open Meeting Law requires local governments to make their meetings open to the public. A remote option was added in 2020 and continued through a temporary provision, which is set to expire at the end of March.
Gov. Maura Healey wants to make that provision permanent but, citing costs for smaller municipalities would keep remote access optional for communities. Opponents say governments shouldn’t have the option to keep barriers to access in place.
Hu compared remote meetings to physical accessibility improvements like elevators and curb cuts, the ramp-like access points on sidewalks.
“It’s not as if municipalities have the flexibility to decide whether a wheelchair is allowed to enter a government building,” Hu said, referring to rights ensured by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
State Rep. Antonio Cabral this session proposed a bill to make hybrid meetings a requirement.
“I think there ought to be uniformity across the state. Everybody needs to comply and follow the same way of doing an open meeting law or doing a public hearing,” Cabral said.
The Massachusetts Municipal Association, the advocacy group for the state’s cities and towns, supports Healey’s proposal to keep it optional. Adam Chapdelaine, executive director of the association, called a mandate to require hybrid meetings “financially and practically infeasible.”
Healey’s proposal offers funding through grant programs to help communities develop the infrastructure for hybrid meetings. Still, Chapdelaine said that some cities and towns have dozens of boards, committees and commissions, and given limited resources and space, a mandate would be “a burden.”
“We’re just saying that mandating it in all circumstances doesn’t match up with the reality of operating local government,” said Chapdelaine.
Advocates say state legislators could address the concern by specifying only some meetings to be included. That’s how the city of Greenfield — which recently passed its own ordinance to require hybrid meetings — tackled the problem.
“The ordinance lists specifically each meeting that’s included within the hybrid recorded format. So it’s not every city meeting that takes place, but it is a good majority of them,” said Matthew Conway, spokesperson for Greenfield’s mayor.
The debate comes at a moment when there are calls for more transparency in government. Voters overwhelmingly backed the state auditor’s push to audit the Massachusetts Legislature.
“I think residents, not just in Massachusetts, but across the country, are looking for ways to have greater confidence in their government, especially at the local level,” said Geoff Foster, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts.
A 2023 survey by a group of nonprofits, including Common Cause, found that more than half of Massachusetts’ city councils, select boards and school committees were conducting fully hybrid or live-streamed meetings. Foster said that data showed many communities already had the means to conduct remote meetings but said without a mandate, some communities won’t opt-in or will revert to in-person only.
“Residents are going to have different levels of access to their local governing bodies, depending on which city or town they live in and what the political will of their local officials are,” he said.
Others say that while the budget may be one consideration, the bigger factor is officials’ resistance to change.
“It’s more of, ‘this is not the status quo, this is not the way that things have been,’ said Milford resident Zach Trulby-Wright.
Milford holds its meetings in person and sends links to residents on a case-by-case basis, making it “very difficult for people to get accommodations where they need them,” said Trulby-Wright, who chairs the Democratic Town Committee.
“The hybrid option is only for people who have, you know, preexisting conditions [and] have approval from the select board to participate hybrid,” Trulby-Wright said. ”It’s a sort of ambiguous approval process.”
He thinks more participation would reduce leaders’ power to “rubber stamp” decisions.
“We have a lot of working parents in town who don’t have the luxury of being able to, you know, attend a meeting that’s three in the afternoon on a weekday,” Trulby-Wright said. “So a lot of it, I think, is by design.”
Milford’s town administrator did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
While hybrid meetings bring more participation, Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, an associate professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, cautions that the democratizing effect of remote meetings is overstated. He cited a 2021 study that showed people who participate in online public meetings “look largely the same as the people who participate in public meetings that are in person,” he said.
If the goal is to make meetings more representative of communities, he said, local governments will have to do more, like targeted outreach or increased civic education.
“One of the things that people ignore is that if you’re going to make meetings online, that can’t be the end all, be all,” said de Benedictis-Kessner.
Katherine Golub, the city councilor who proposed Greenfield’s hybrid meeting ordinance, said online access is critical for communities.
“In a time when democracy is threatened and curtailed by the federal government, our state leaders have a responsibility to do everything in their power to safeguard public participation at the local level,” Golub said.
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