A few weeks ago the Vermont Secretary of State, Jim Condos, made a mistake. He posted… and then deleted an “offer” regarding a $75 coupon from Costco…. that turned out to be a scam.
Fellow blogger John Walters covered the story but from more of a political bent. As I’ve explained in the past, this blog is focused on legal issues, my (somewhat anemic) political blog can be found here. What are the legal issues raised by this post and subsequent deletion you ask? Thanks for asking, they are myriad.
First, Secretary Condos has been extremely “conservative” in is reading of how the Vermont Open Meeting and Vermont Public Records laws should be interpreted. Here’s a Twitter exchange I had with his office several years ago (not ironically underscoring the importance of preserving public records).
What are the lessons that we learn from this advice? 1) Err on the side of transparency. 2) Beware of meeting in cyberspace. 3) That the Open Meetings Law was written well before social media and never contemplated how do deal with it. I don’t disagree with any of that in principal, but everything can be taken too far. This series of tweets from @VermontSOS was in response to my inquiry about Secretary Condo’s position in his 2016 Guide to Open Meetings where in he admonished public bodies as follows:
A literal reading of this “advice” means that if a quorum of a public body is “on” Facebook or Front Porch Forum, and one of them discusses public business, then that can be construed as an illegal meeting of the body public. Such a reading is not conservative, it strains reason and goes well beyond the plain meaning of the Open Meeting Law, ultimately leading to absurd and irrational consequences.
As part of that conversation I inquired as to how Secretary Condos’s office curated and archived their own tweets and here is the exchange.
That was three years ago, and as far as I can tell, since it is still proffered on the Secretary’s website, there has been no revision to Secretary Condos’s “A Matter of Public Record: A Guide to Vermont’s Public Records Laws” since it was last published in 2014.
Circling back around, brings us back to the present kerfuffle regarding the Costco coupon post. Walter’s interview with the Secretary’s Chief of Staff Eric Covey revealed the following – “So wait. In so doing, did Condos destroy a public record? No, because the post was on his personal page, not his official one. In addition, it had nothing to do with his day job. “Had it...
