Our View: Communications

Most of our local towns have adopted emergency notification systems that allow residents to sign up to be notified of road closures, water breaks, snow or storm emergencies and the like. Towns and many individual departments also maintain accounts on Facebook, X, Instagram and other social media services. So there’s really no excuse when it comes to pushing out important information in a timely manner.

 But that didn’t happen last week, when the Harwich town website went down and nobody seemed to notice for almost a day. Why is this a big deal? It’s not like it was an indispensable site like Amazon, Netflix or Google. Why does it matter if a town website is inaccessible for a couple of days?

 Because the town site being unreachable meant that the provisions of the state Open Meeting Law weren’t met. Once upon a time, towns physically posted notices of public meetings on bulletin boards in town halls and other publicly accessible places, but for years now that function has been moved to websites with the blessing of the state legislature. But when a site goes down and the 48-hour notice in the law can’t be met, there is fallout in the form of cancelled meetings. The select board, health board and conservation commission, among others, had to cancel meetings on the advice of town counsel because of the website being inaccessible.

 In the short run, no harm was done; meetings were rescheduled, nothing of an immediate nature went unaddressed. However, some folks scheduled to make presentations were not notified that the meetings had been cancelled, and the town’s effort to inform residents was limited to a single Facebook posting by the fire department and a few other town departments (town government itself doesn’t have any social media accounts that we are aware of). To our knowledge, no alerts were sent. The Facebook posting was made on Jan. 20 at around 5 p.m. and said the problem was discovered around 3 p.m. that day.

 The problem was traced to a security certificate, which was not renewed after its Jan. 19 expiration. Lack of such a certificate prevents most browsers from accessing a site because there is no guarantee that it is secure. Its periodic renewal is usually routine. The site was down from sometime Sunday or early Monday until sometime Tuesday. While Monday was a holiday, it’s problematic that nobody in town government seemed to notice for almost a day, and then took only limited steps to notify the public and made no effort to contact the media so that we could get the word out. This is both a failure of transparency and of management, and goes right to the top. Harwich should look closely at its website management and communications practices to ensure that the public doesn’t have to be left wondering why the town can’t manage a simple task like renewing a security certificate, which, as we saw, can have wide-ranging implications.