Website Trouble Forces Plymouth Select Board Cancellation

PLYMOUTH, MA —A municipal website outage that affected Massachusetts communities over the course of two days was responsible for nixing Tuesday's Select Board meeting in Plymouth. Plymouth Town Manager Melissa Arrighi said that because off the site outage the town was not able to meet the state notification requirement for public meetings.

Plymouth officials sent out a notification on Tuesday that the meeting had been postponed due to "unexpected circumstances."

Arrighi said the Plymouth site was down for approximately seven hours. She said restoration of services started at about 3 p.m. and the site was functioning early Tuesday evening. The meeting was postponed to Monday at 7 p.m. in the 1820 Courtroom of Town Hall.

A vendor that provides Website services to 4,000 municipal governments, including dozens in Massachusetts, continued to wrestle with outage problems Tuesday. The CivicPlus outages prevented residents from doing everything from paying excisetax bills online to checking polling locations for early voting in next week's Massachusetts primary, which began this week.

According to state law: "Where a public body adopts a website as its method of noticing meetings, it must make every effort to ensure that the website is accessible to the public at all hours. If a website becomes inaccessible to members of the public within 48 hours of a meeting, not including Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays, the municipal clerk or other individual responsible for posting notice to the website must restore the website to accessibility within six hours of the time, during regular business hours, when such individual discovers that the website has become inaccessible. In the event that the website is not restored to accessibility within six business hours of the website’s deficiency being discovered, the public body must re-post notice of its meeting for another date and time in accordance with M.G.L. c. 30A, § 20(b)."

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