ACLU Report Urges Improvement in Municipal Practices Governing the Public’s Remote Access to Public Meetings

The ACLU of Rhode Island today released a report examining the practices of city and town councils and school committees in providing the public remote access to their meetings, and said there was a need for improvement in their practices. The report, an update to one the ACLU issued almost two years ago, found that while some public bodies had enhanced their remote access practices since the first report, the public’s ability to monitor and participate remotely in meetings continued to face barriers in many instances.

Read the report

The report released today examined four facets of remote access by city and town councils and school committees: whether members of the public could (1) watch meetings remotely; (2) access archived recordings of the meetings; (3) review agenda packets remotely; and (4) participate in meetings remotely. The report found that only 12 city and town councils and five school committees met all four of those criteria, while three town councils and two school committees met none of them.  While most of these bodies livestream and archive their meetings, sharing agenda packets and allowing remote participation by the public were less common. In particular, the ACLU’s study found:

• 33 of 39 city and town councils make livestreaming options available to the public, as do 30 of 34 school committees.
• A large majority of these public bodies offer archived meeting videos for future viewing. Altogether, 35 of 39 city and town councils post recordings of their meetings. On the school committee side, 29 of 34 provide open archived recordings of their meetings to the public. One school committee – Exeter-West Greenwich – adds an extra barrier to viewing by requiring individuals to obtain a password to access recordings of past meetings.
• While 32 of 39 city and town councils commendably include links to their agenda packets or discussion documents for public access, only a little more than half of the school committees offer the public access to their materials in advance of the meeting.
• Few public bodies allow remote participation in meetings by the public, something that was commonplace during the first years of the COVID pandemic. Only 13 city or town councils offer any kind of remote participation options, while nine school committees do so. On the positive side, when the ACLU issued its first report on this topic in 2023, only one school committee had been offering remote participation.

In noting the varied results of the ACLU’s survey, today’s report said that “2025 provides an opportunity for progress. As a result of elections in November 2024, there have been changes in the membership of many of these public bodies, and we believe it presents an opportune time for those entities to reexamine their remote access policies.”    

The report encouraged public bodies to “move fully into the post-COVID 21st Century and adopt these important features promoting greater transparency,” and reiterated a point made in the 2023 analysis about the enormous benefit of remote access by the public to these meetings: 

"Access to the democratic process should no longer hinge on a person’s physical mobility or their ability to afford a car, get time off work, or find a childcare provider. If municipal councils and school committees positively address the access issues analyzed in this report, they will be taking important steps in further promoting the Open Meetings Act’s goal of having 'public business be performed in an open and public manner.'”

A copy of the report can be found here.