In 2015, the Massachusetts Attorney General issued an Open Meeting Law (OML) determination regarding the Town of Rockport. While OML 2015-164 specifically addressed the release of executive session minutes, it established a brutal legal precedent for how every municipal board handles its historical records.
The ruling dismantled the most common defense towns use when they fall behind on meeting minutes: the excuse of administrative burden. OML 2015-164 states clearly that administrative burdens aren't excuses but were actually the entire point: the lesson was to keep up with minutes. Now, towns face legal and financial vulnerability that any individual can trigger with a single email.
Here is a breakdown of the ruling, the precedent it set, and how towns must structurally adapt to avoid the liability it created.
The background
The dispute in Rockport began when a resident requested access to executive session minutes from the Board of Selectmen spanning multiple decades. Under Massachusetts law, executive session minutes can be withheld only as long as the publication of those records would defeat the lawful purpose of the executive session. Once that purpose expires, the minutes must be reviewed and released.
Faced with a massive historical records request, Rockport failed to produce the reviewed minutes in a timely manner. The town argued that the sheer volume of the request made compliance within standard statutory timeframes impossible. Reviewing decades of records for redactions and exemptions required a massive diversion of staff and legal resources.
The Attorney General rejected this defense entirely. Rockport had also tried to charge the requester $29.31 an hour for the time spent reviewing the minutes; the AG rejected that too, ruling that a public body cannot assess a fee for its own review time.
The precedent: three core rulings
OML 2015-164 established three non-negotiable standards for how municipalities must manage their meeting records.
1. The absolute 30-day clock
The Attorney General ruled that a public body must review and produce requested minutes by its next meeting or within 30 days of the request, whichever comes first. This clock is firm. The town cannot indefinitely pause the release of public records while it attempts to get organized.
2. Volume is no defense
The AG explicitly stated that a municipality cannot use its own failure to regularly review minutes as an excuse for needing more time. The burden of fulfilling a massive, multi-decade records request was placed squarely on the town. Administrative backlog, understaffing, or the sheer quantity of the requested documents do not grant a town an extension beyond the statutory limits.
3. The definition of "reasonable intervals"
The Open Meeting Law requires public bodies to review unreleased executive session minutes at "reasonable intervals" to determine if they can be made public. Prior to 2015, the definition of a reasonable interval was vague, allowing towns to simply let old minutes sit in a file cabinet unreviewed. OML 2015-164 ruled that waiting years to review past minutes constitutes a clear violation of the law. However, OML 2015-164 did leave open that the reality of reviewing such a large backlog of minutes is time-intensive, encouraging the petitioner to determine a "reasonable schedule for production of such minutes."
The structural threat to municipalities
OML 2015-164 dictates that a minutes backlog is a crisis waiting for a catalyst. Under OML 2015-164, a single resident can weaponize that backlog. If a citizen files a broad records request for a board with unapproved or unreviewed minutes, the town is instantly put on a 30-day clock.
This triggers a costly cascade of events. Town staff must comb through old agendas, track down former board members, locate old audio recordings, and frantically draft months or years of minutes. Town counsel is frequently brought to handle the formal response to the Attorney General. If the town fails to meet the deadline, the AG issues formal reprimands, mandates remedial training, and can levy fines. Rockport itself got off with a warning, but the warning had teeth: the AG put the town on notice that a similar future violation "may be considered evidence of an intentional violation of the law" — and intentional violations are what unlock civil penalties.
The town incurs massive costs precisely because it treated the minutes as a low-priority task.
The solution: process over effort
The Rockport ruling proves that towns cannot rely on retroactive compliance. Waiting for a records request to force the creation or review of minutes guarantees an Open Meeting Law violation.
Protecting a municipality from an OML 2015-164 violation requires removing the backlog. This means shifting minutes production from a manual, delayed task to an automatic, parallel process.
This is an information piece for general knowledge purpose, may contain errors, and is not legal advice.