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SECTION II: NOTICE
Except in an emergency, a notice of every meeting of any governmental body shall be filed with the clerk of the city or town in which the body acts, and the notice or a copy thereof shall, at least forty-eight hours, including Saturdays but not Sundays and legal holidays, prior to such meeting, be publicly posted in the office of such clerk or on the principal official bulletin board of such city or town.
"Emergency," a sudden, generally unexpected occurrence or set of circumstances demanding immediate action.”
The intention of the notice provisions of the Open Meeting Law is obvious. The public's right to attend the meetings of a governmental body would be rendered hollow unless citizens are provided with a means to inform themselves of the time, date and place of the meeting. Thus, the posting requirements are not an empty formality but rather the core of the statute. The postings must give the public actual notice of the time, date and place of a meeting.
A governmental body may comply with these notice requirements by filing and posting in advance a printed schedule of its future meetings. In such case, the body must in fact meet regularly at the scheduled time and place.
If such a schedule of future meetings is compiled and posted, there is no need to file and post a separate notice of each meeting prior to holding that meeting. On the other hand, a governmental body cannot rely on a prefiled schedule to satisfy the laws notice requirement if in fact it does not regularly meet at the scheduled times.
It has been suggested that a board may satisfy the notice requirements by posting a notice which indicates a range of times within which the board may meet. One municipality, until recently, posted notices which indicated that its boards would hold meetings during the hours of 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.
Such a posting is meaningless when it is understood that the statutes requirement is intended to give the public actual notice of the exact date, time and place of the meeting so that those citizens who wished to attend may do so. The illegality of the posting described above is therefore obvious. No posting is adequate if it leaves the public in doubt as to the circumstances under which a meeting is held. The public does not have to catch a board in order to attend.
The notice requirements need not be complied with when a meeting is occasioned by an 'emergency' which is defined as a sudden, generally unexpected occurrence or set of circumstances demanding immediate action.
No Massachusetts case has considered the propriety under the Open Meeting Law of an emergency meeting. However, it is reasonable to predict that confronted with a case, the courts will hold that 'emergency meetings' cannot be used as a subterfuge to avoid the requirements of the Open Meeting Law. In the case of Pioneer Liquor Mart, Inc. v. Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission, 350 Mass. 1 (1965), the Supreme Judicial Court considered whether the power of a state agency to promulgate rules without complying with statutory notice and hearing requirements in an emergency was appropriately excercised. The Court stated:
| "We recognized that emergency findings under [the statute] must be carefully scrutinized because if unwarrantably made, they may lead to improper denial of public hearings or comment.... to evasion of the salutary purposes of [the statute] and possibly other serious abuse." |
The subject matter to be discussed at an emergency meeting is limited to that necessitated by the emergency. No other business may be discussed. For example, a meeting by a board of selectmen to nominate a police officer to take charge of the police department because of the sudden and generally unexpected resignation of the chief of the department, cannot be used as an occasion to discuss the granting of a liquor license.
