The board of Vermont Public Television violated federal open meeting requirements on 26 occasions between 2011 and 2013, an internal audit found.
Thomas Pelletier, chairman of the board’s audit committee, said the internal investigation was launched after a Dec. 24, 2013 anonymous complaint alleging the board violated open meeting requirements in 22 cases.
Vermont Public Television is not legally required to follow Vermont open meeting laws, but the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – which provides 16 percent of VPT’s budget – requires that grantee stations follow federal open meeting requirements.
Pelletier said that under those rules, normal meetings of the board must be announced in advance and must be open to the public. But in some cases, such as discussion of personnel issues or advice of counsel, the board is allowed to hold closed meetings without prior warning. It must only post notice after the fact that the meeting occurred and name the reason it was closed to the public.
“Each of the closed meetings identified to [the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the anonymous complaint] was properly closed in accordance with a valid exception to the open meeting requirements,” he said.
However, Pelletier added that public postings about the closed meetings fell short.
“Vermont Public Television did not subsequently post a required notice on its website providing the time and date of the closed meeting and identifying the applicable exception or exceptions pursuant to which the meeting was closed,” he said.
This failure to post represents a violation of the federal open meeting requirements, he said, but wasn't - as the anonymous tipster alleged - intentional. The reason the board didn't post about the meetings after the fact, Pelletier said in an interview, was that "we did not have a sufficient understanding of the requirements."
Four of the 22 meetings alleged to be in violation of the requirements were not officially meetings, Pelletier said. The audit’s scope went beyond just the 22 instances named in the anonymous complaint, though, and found an additional eight violations. In total, the audit found that VPT’s board of directors and committees violated open meeting requirements in 26 cases by not disclosing the closed meetings after the fact.
None of those meetings, Pelletier said, were improperly closed, but all of them should have been publicly posted about after the fact.
In an effort to rectify the situation and prevent future violations, the audit committee developed 10 recommendations for the board. The recommendations included publishing an open meetings policy on the VPT website, checking for open meeting compliance at each meeting of the board and expanded open meetings training for VPT board members.
