I’m a reporter in Saratoga County. I recently tried to attend a meeting of a Civilian Review Board in Saratoga Springs, but when I went to the time and place listed on the agenda, no one was there. I waited for 30 minutes and no one showed up. I checked social media, the website, and my email for any notice that the meeting was cancelled, but didn’t see anything. I later saw the CRB post the next meeting’s agenda, which was a duplicate of the meeting that seemed to have been cancelled without notice.
My question is this: is there any requirement under the Open Meetings Law to give notice when a previously noticed meeting is cancelled?
Our understanding is that New York’s Open Meetings Law does not expressly require a public body to give formal public notice when a previously noticed meeting is cancelled or postponed.
The Open Meetings Law is very clear that public bodies must give advance notice of the time and place of meetings. If a meeting is scheduled at least a week in advance, notice must be given to the public and news media at least 72 hours beforehand; if scheduled less than a week in advance, notice must be given “to the extent practicable” at a reasonable time beforehand.
But cancellation notice is a weaker area. The Committee on Open Government has addressed this directly. In Advisory Opinion OML-AO-4571, COOG stated: “In short, the Open Meetings Law contains no such requirement.”
That said, COOG also advised that, as a matter of reasonableness and courtesy, notice of a cancellation or postponement should be given to members of the body and to the recipients of the original meeting notice, and should be posted where meeting notices are normally posted.
So the short answer: probably not a technical Open Meetings Law violation by itself, but it is bad practice and contrary to COOG’s guidance. If the CRB had noticed a public meeting and then silently cancelled it, it should have posted a cancellation notice on the website and at the meeting location, and sent it to the same media list or interested parties who received the original notice.
There is one additional point worth checking: if the board actually met somewhere else, at a different time, or informally discussed public business with a quorum present, that would raise a much more serious Open Meetings Law issue. But if the meeting simply did not happen, the failure is likely one of poor notice practice rather than a clear statutory violation.
