BERLIN – Municipal officials discussed email voting practices this week after the town violated the Maryland Open Meetings Act with a recent vote.
Members of the Berlin Town Council talked about the specifics of email voting on Monday after Councilman Steve Green asked about the violation. The discussion was prompted by a July opinion from the Open Meetings Compliance Board (OMCB) that said the town violated the Open Meetings Act with email voting regarding a budget transfer.
“Nobody’s trying to be nefarious,” Mayor Zack Tyndall said. “We’re doing things in a way that it’s been done for a long time. With that, when things like this come up we try to learn from it.”
The OMCB issued an opinion July 31 that the Berlin Town Council violated the Open Meetings Act with a May 31 email vote regarding a budget transfer. Council members noted they’d read about the opinion in the newspaper and asked if practices needed to be changed moving forward.
David Gaskill, the town’s attorney, said he disagreed with the OMCB opinion.
“The board determined there was a meeting even though there was really no discussion,” Gaskill said. “They hung their hat on the fact that because everyone hit the ‘reply all’ button it was really a meeting. To me that’s absurd. There was no discussion amongst the group.”
According to the OMCB opinion, the email exchange constituted a meeting because within a short period of time a quorum of councilmembers sent ‘reply all’ emails to all members of the council about the same topic, which had not previously been discussed publicly.
“I was disappointed in the opinion but it is what it is,” Gaskill said, adding that going forward, if there was a need for an email vote the council should not use the ‘reply all’ option.
Tyndall said the town had just been operating the way it always had.
“Following that decision, we did have an instance where the same thing could have occurred, which is why I sent an email to the group and said do not do that, reply directly to Kate,” Tyndall said, referencing a more recent email vote. “Each time we have these things, we’re doing processes, we’re trying to dissect and understand the Open Meetings Act.”
He said the town’s elected officials were trying to learn from mistakes.
“I think the message to this group is don’t ‘reply all,’” he said.
According to the OMCB website, after a violation occurs the public body involved is required to announce and summarize the opinion at its next open meeting. A majority of the members of the public body are also supposed to sign a copy of the opinion to return to the OMCB.
