Rockville recently launched a redesigned city website with a fresh look and a more user-friendly layout. The home page now highlights key services—trash pickup, water billing, affordable housing, and city jobs—making it much easier for residents to find the information they use most often.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the Mayor and Council page, which is far less intuitive and raises concerns about public access and transparency.

If you go to the main Mayor and Council page, you’d expect a clear link to meeting agendas, minutes, and videos—the core of local democracy. Instead, clicking “Meetings” simply scrolls you down the same page to a paragraph explaining that the Mayor and Council usually meet on Mondays in City Hall. That’s useful background, but it doesn’t help residents find out what their elected officials are actually discussing or deciding.

To access agendas and minutes, users must keep scrolling until they reach a small box labeled “Resources.” That’s where the real information lives—but the label is misleading. Meeting agendas and minutes are not “resources”; they’re official public records essential to government transparency.

Adding to the confusion, the “View Upcoming Meetings” box doesn’t work as intended—it omits the Mayor and Council meetings entirely. Instead, it’s the “Mayor and Council Meeting Agendas” link that takes you to a list of upcoming sessions, but it lacks clickable links to watch the meetings online. Meanwhile, the Leadership Planning Meetings—which are important working sessions of the Mayor and Council for long-term priorities—aren’t listed in their calendar at all. Instead, they are treated like boards and commissions, when they are actually a type of Mayor and Council meeting.

For a city that values open government, these gaps are more than inconvenient—they risk violating Maryland’s Open Meetings Act, which requires public bodies to provide timely access to meeting agendas and minutes.

Rockville’s efforts to improve usability are commendable, but transparency must be part of usability. The city’s website should make it just as easy to see what government is doing as it is to find out when your recycling gets picked up.

Let’s hope these issues are corrected soon. In the meantime, residents who want to stay informed will need to dig deeper than they should have to.

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Why the Open Meetings Act Matters

Maryland’s Open Meetings Act exists to ensure that government decisions are made in the open, not behind closed doors. It requires public bodies—like Rockville’s Mayor and Council—to:

• Provide advance notice of meetings to the public.
• Post agendas that clearly describe the topics to be discussed.
• Make minutes and recordings available promptly after meetings.

These aren’t just technicalities; they’re the foundation of public trust. Residents have a right to know what issues are being considered, when discussions are happening, and how decisions are made.

When meeting information is buried, mislabeled, or missing, it prevents citizens from participating meaningfully in their government—and that undermines the very principles the Open Meetings Act was designed to protect.

Transparency doesn’t just mean posting information somewhere online. It means making that information easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to use.

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