Thursday, March 23, 2000

Town site concerns brings about review Wednesday - By DAN SHOHL - STAFF WRITER

The town's Data Processing Advisory Board will hold a meeting Wednesday to begin developing a formal policy for content on Arlington's municipal Web site. The meeting was scheduled following a controversy over Superintendent Kathleen Donovan's decision earlier this month to remove a link on the town's website to the personal site of Paul Schlichtman, who is campaigning in support of a $34.5 million ballot question for Arlington schools as well as four candidates for Arlington School Committee and the Board of Selectmen. Both will be decided at town elections on April 1.

Donovan said she had pulled the connection because she was concerned about possible conflict with campaign finance rules governing the use of town resources in ballot question campaigns. Both Schlichtman and Donovan support a "yes" vote on the ballot question.

All six candidates for the two offices (Jack Hurd, George Laite, Kathleen Kiely Dias, Denis Sullivan, George Piandes and David McKenna) have stated publicly they support a "yes" vote on the ballot question.

Selectman Diane Mahon, who also supports the debt exclusion, had tried in November to make the creation of a policy for town website content part of the goals and objectives, this year's to-do list, for Town Manager Donald Marquis. She said she had objected to the town site linking to a personal website with political content, including Schlichtman's site. She said Monday that if the issue had been addressed when she had proposed the development of rules for the website, the current flap could have been averted.

"It's [a question of] policy, not Paul," said Mahon. "Right now, what we're doing is reacting to a situation. If we had acted in November, we probably would not have had any of this."

At a Monday meeting of the board, selectmen Jack Hurd and Kathleen Kiely Dias said that the rest of the board had not supported Mahon's approach to developing the policy because it had been made part of the manager's goals. The town employee who oversees Arlington's website, A.L. "Al" Minervini, does not report to Marquis. Minervini, who is also the town's comptroller, is appointed solely and directly by the selectmen. Until Monday, no other selectman had proposed drafting a policy on website content.

At one point, the town website had multiple connections to Schlichtman's personal page. Schlichtman had developed a current list of Town Meeting members that was posted on the town website, a list that carried a link to his own webpage.

In response to a complaint in February by Dan Tobin, then running for Town Democratic Committee and supporting Laite and Piandes, about the support for his opponents on Schlichtman's link, Minervini had the link on the Town Meeting member page removed. Schlichtman raised his loudest objection last week, when Donovan, who developed her own separate concerns about the ballot question promotion, directed that his last link be removed from a section of the town website where any resident may put a link to a personal page.

The state Office of Campaign and Political Finance oversees and enforces campaign finance laws that Donovan said were the source of her concern. An OCPF mailing on the rules for ballot question elections that Donovan referred to prohibits "utilizing staff time, paper or other materials, office equipment or any other public resource to support or oppose a ballot question ..."

While the rules governing public Web sites are an evolving area of the law, the state generally allows the sort of private-page connections Arlington has maintained, according to OCPF spokesman Dennis Kennedy. The most important thing, he said, is that access rules are evenly applied. He said the OCPF had recently upheld a practice in Cambridge, where members of the city council had links on the city website that connected to their personal pages, some of which took positions on candidates in upcoming elections.

"The town itself should not be in the business of advocating on the Web," said Kennedy. "If the town provides equal access to those who offer opinions on their own Web sites, it's generally not a problem. "The campaign finance law just says that as long as everybody has access, or nobody has access, or there are recognizable standards for access, you're generally okay."

The advisory board will hold its public meeting from 10 a.m. to noon on Wednesday in the Arlington School Committee's sixth-floor hearing room at Arlington High School, 869 Massachusetts Ave.