Select Board sets April 30 deadline for minutes

Select Board · Meeting of February 18, 2026

HARDWICK — The Hardwick Select Board voted to accept inventories of 21 unapproved open-session and 24 unapproved executive-session meeting minutes and set an April 30, 2026 deadline to finish the executive-session backlog. The votes, all unanimous, came in response to a December 16, 2025 Open Meeting Law complaint over minutes timeliness. Resident Bill Cole told members the volume of public records requests, roughly 25 by his count, is "pretty preposterous." Select Board member Jeffrey Schaaf and member William F. Tinker clashed over whether the board has oversight of public records handling, with Schaaf maintaining the issue "is not part of our purview." The town administrator told the board drafting minutes "is not the job of the town administrators." Members weighed using an AI tool, Microsoft Copilot, to draft minutes after a Conservation Commission member warned it took him "three or four days" to fix.

In the full story:

• The Full Story
• [00:15:57] — Bill Cole, resident, public comment
• [00:19:03] — Jeffrey Schaaf, Select Board
• [00:35:36] — Hardwick Town Administrator
• Why It Matters
• Key Motions & Votes
• Source
• Hardwick's community access TV: Select Board meeting, February 18, 2026
• The complete report: 848 words

Source: the Select Board meeting of February 18, 2026, reported from the official video recording and transcript.

Checked against the record: before publication this article was automatically compared with the meeting transcript.