Swampscott meeting notices were on the Town Hall board while web copies lagged five to six days

← All news · August 24, 2026

Seven agendas posted to the town's website on Aug. 24-25 are phone photos of paper notices pinned to Town Hall's bulletin board, two written out by hand. Town Clerk RECEIVED stamps show the physical board carried notices on time while the web copy lagged. Also: a correction to this paper's Aug. 24 record, and what remains offline on day 9.

Swampscott’s paper meeting record appears to have kept moving during the network disruption that froze much of the town’s online record. Seven agendas posted to the town’s AgendaCenter between the early morning of Aug. 24 and the early morning of Aug. 25 are phone photographs of paper notices pinned to the bulletin board outside the Town Clerk’s office. The Clerk’s RECEIVED stamps on four notices show the physical board received them on time while the online copies lagged five to six days.

The seven new AgendaCenter entries, ids 840 through 846, cover the Earth Removal Advisory Committee (meeting Aug. 24), the Community Life Center feasibility task force (Aug. 24, Zoom-only), Harbor and Waterfront (Aug. 24), the Zoning Board of Appeals (Aug. 26), the Retirement Board’s open and executive sessions (Aug. 25), and the Conservation Commission (Aug. 25). Three weeks ago and less, these same bodies posted typed, searchable PDFs. This week they posted photographs of the notices on the corkboard — pushpins and cork visible in the frame, one shot taken at an angle. The Harbor and Waterfront committee’s date and time were handwritten over a typed form. The Retirement Board’s two notices were written out entirely by hand.

Paper notices were stamped before the meetings

Four of the seven photographs carry the Town Clerk’s inked RECEIVED stamp. The Conservation Commission’s notice was stamped Aug. 19 at 3:44 p.m., the afternoon after the disruption began. The Community Life Center task force’s was stamped Aug. 19 at 5:01 p.m. The Retirement Board’s was stamped Aug. 20 at 11:53 a.m. The ZBA’s carries the pre-incident stamp of Aug. 5. The Earth Removal and Harbor notices show no visible stamp in the posted images.

Those times show the physical board at 22 Monument Ave. was receiving and carrying meeting notices throughout the freeze, each inside the Open Meeting Law’s 48-hour posting window for its meeting. What stalled was the web copy: the Conservation Commission notice received Aug. 19 reached the website only on Aug. 24 or 25; the Retirement Board notice received Aug. 20 surfaced Aug. 25.

The artifacts point to a practical workaround. AgendaCenter is hosted off-site by CivicPlus and has never gone down. The Clerk’s office appears to be publishing there from a phone camera because its normal scan-to-PDF and file-share workflow runs on the town network that is offline. The two handwritten Retirement Board notices point the same way: an office that could not print on Aug. 20 wrote the notice out and pinned it up. That is an inference from the documents. The town has not said how it is posting.

The distinction between the board and the website matters. Under the Open Meeting Law’s implementing regulations (940 CMR 29.03), a town designates a single official method of posting notice for public bodies: either the bulletin board in the building that houses the town clerk or the municipal website. The Attorney General’s office holds that filing. If Swampscott’s designated method is the physical board, the web freeze is not an Open Meeting Law problem: the notices were posted, on paper, on time.

Which method Swampscott designated with the Attorney General is not in this paper’s record, and the compliance question turns on that filing. This paper can describe what the record looked like during the incident: paper first, the website a photograph of the paper, days behind. It cannot say whether the town met its legal duty. What a resident could observe is clear: for five to six days, these agendas could not be found online; on the board at Town Hall, they were there.

Correction: the ZBA agenda was already online

On Aug. 24, this paper’s working notes stated that the Aug. 26 ZBA meeting had “no posted agenda anywhere on the town’s web surfaces” and built an observation about a closing 48-hour posting deadline on that absence. That was wrong. The ZBA agenda had been online since Aug. 5 as id 823, a searchable PDF posted by the Town Clerk 21 days ahead of the meeting. It never left. No posting-deadline question existed for it.

The town re-posted the same ZBA notice a second time this week as a corkboard photograph, id 843, while the original stayed live. The listing now carries the notice twice. The Clerk’s office appears to be photographing everything on the physical board without checking what is already online.

The error was this paper’s instrument outrunning the town’s own surfaces. It is the second self-correction on this beat in three weeks, after the Aug. 7 report that called land-use videos “missing” when a second SCTV archive held them.

Select Board and video remain offline

The photographs are the one part of the online record that moved. Much has not.

The agendas include seawall, pension, and security items

The substance behind the photographs is mostly continuation. Whether any of these meetings convened is unknown: SCTV is dark and minutes lag.

Earth Removal takes up the 555 Essex St. (Vinnin Square) earth-removal permit sought by Swampscott Multi Owner LLC for a third straight agenda, plus quarry air monitoring. The Community Life Center task force, meeting on Zoom in its eighth all-virtual notice this year, was to see the consultant Abacus present build-out drawings for “the sites identified as most feasible” for a new center; that short-list exists, and none of it is public. Harbor and Waterfront re-noticed an identical agenda for the third Monday running: commercial fishing rights and the Fish House, pier repair, and the Mission on the Bay seawall. That pattern is consistent with, though not proof of, the earlier meetings not convening. Conservation continued the Mission on the Bay seawall filing again and brought back the no-trespassing signs at Whales Beach, the item counsel at KP Law is reviewing. Tonia Bandrowicz, who chairs the Conservation Commission and sits on Earth Removal, appears on two of the seven notices.

The Retirement Board’s handwritten notices list routine business: a newly hired reference librarian enrolled in the pension system, two refunds for former school tutors, the death of a retired fire captain on Aug. 3, and quarterly fund reviews. The board then noticed an executive session to discuss “the deployment of security personnel or devices.” It is the first session of that kind this board has noticed in the record, and it was written on the seventh day of the network incident. The subject cannot be known from the notice, and this paper draws no line between it and the outage.

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