SAUGUS — The Board of Selectmen and Chair Anthony Cogliano were found in violation of the state’s Open Meeting Law, after an attorney in Alanna filed a complaint with Attorney General Maura Healey’s office.
The complaint was twofold: The Board failed to post the names of businesses in town whose licenses were being renewed, and Cogliano failed to note that the Selectmen’s meeting was being recorded.
The violations occurred during the board’s Dec. 13 meeting, where license renewals appeared on the agenda and were approved, but the specific names of businesses were not included in the public posting, which appears on the town website as well as on a bulletin board inside town hall.
Cogliano announced the violations at a board meeting on Tuesday morning, which was scheduled to resolve the complaint from Healey’s office.
“We rescheduled the meeting for this morning so we could put all the licenses to be renewed on the agenda,” he said. “Just for knowledge of the board, this is my 14th year on the board — I’ve never put licenses on them, listed them ever in those 14 years. I don’t believe anyone else has.”
“This will be something new we start moving forward,” he added.
The second violation, much like the first, Cogliano said, was something he had never done during his long tenure on the board.
“I got a violation for not saying that the meeting was being recorded, and again, in my 14 years, I’ve never seen that either,” he said. “Just for the benefit of the public, we are being recorded today and will be recorded every meeting from now until the cows come home.”
The Open Meeting Law requires that the list of topics on a meeting agenda “must be sufficiently specific to reasonably inform the public of the issues to be discussed at the meeting,” according to the attorney general’s office’s Open Meeting Law guide.
But, Cogliano said, the violations he received were addressed to the chair of the Board of Selectmen in Plainville. He said he reached out to Healey’s office for clarification but hadn’t heard back.
Correction: Due to a reporter’s error an earlier version of this story incorrectly described the origin of the open meeting law complaint against Saugus. An attorney in Alabama filed the complaint against the Board of Selectmen and Chair Anthony Cogliano. The Item regrets the error.
