Town Clerk Is Obstacle to Transparency

Our elected town clerk, Mary Lou Payette, is not on board for town government transparency. I met with her originally on April 10, and spoke with her on April 21. We agreed that I would come to her office on Monday, April 23.

When I did, she could not tell me which boards and commissions file their agendas and minutes with the town clerk’s office (but see below, where I found part of the answer at the library). She said that she had nothing to do with agendas, that I had to go to each board and commission for them. This is a serious problem, because agendas need to be filed only 24 hours before a meeting, so they require quick action to get up on-line so that citizens can know whether they want to go to a particular meeting and have time to prepare for that meeting.

She said that she would have notices of special meetings (which only require 24 hours’ notice as well) and changes in times and locations of meetings placed in the library, but would not fax or email them to me. After I protested, she suggested that she might call me.

The only minutes she could give me were the Town Meeting minutes, in xerox form. I told her that since I am putting these minutes up as a public service to the town – effectively doing the town’s work – I should not be charged for copying (the charge is 50 cents a page). Ms. Payette told me that anyone could come in saying that they were acting in the public interest. As if town information websites were proliferating in North Haven. A serious problem.

She also said that all the other towns around charge $1 per page, as if that mattered. I said that in Hamden you can get most minutes at the library and pay only 15 cents. A man who happened to be in the office (and seemed to spend a lot of time in clerks' offices) named one town clerk's office that charged only 25 cents, and said that most towns charge 50 cents (which is, by the way, the legal limit). He then said, "On the shoreline..." Payette said, "They charge a dollar." "No," he said, "they charge 50 cents."

Then she went into the next office, and when she returned, she told me that she had to charge me, she had no choice. I asked her who could make the decision whether to charge me or not? She is, after all, the town clerk, and the xerox machine and files are in her charge. She stood firm, and I left in a huff.

I went to the library to look at which boards and commissions placed their minutes there. I discovered that the following boards and commissions file their minutes with the town clerk’s office (at least their minutes carry the clerk's office stamp): Cable Advisory Council (although nothing in library since 1996); Economic Development Council (although nothing in library since 2003); and Inland Wetlands Commission (up-to-date). But since few boards or commissions apparently send their minutes to the library, it’s hard to know how many more there are (Payette mentioned the Board of Ethics, but their latest minutes in the library were from 1996).

This is a sad town. The Town Meeting is not even mentioned on the town website, except for a reference to its founding back in the eighteenth century (under History). Neither calls for meetings, resolutions, nor minutes are placed on-line or in the library. Yes, the calls and resolutions are in the local newspapers, but those get thrown out. It’s important to have an ongoing record of them easily available for research, for example, to see patterns in how things are done. Now that we have the Internet, there's no reason not to use it. No, I take that back, there are many reasons, but none of them in the public interest.

My goal in doing what I am doing is to train North Haven’s town government to act transparently, to be open about everything it does. A town clerk should be the leader in seeking transparency, but here in North Haven, our town clerk is dragging her feet and making feeble excuses. Perhaps it is because she knows that the Democrats may not run anyone against her in November. Perhaps the solution is for someone to run. Or to have a clerk appointed by a nonpartisan town manager, the best long-term solution.