City council drops social media policy

By GLYNIS HART
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CLAREMONT — After a city council member’s social media posts caused an uproar in Claremont last December, the council has struggled to find an appropriate way to respond. Councilor Jon Stone posted derogatory comments to Facebook that applied to a private citizen and his wife. One month later, a vote to censure Stone failed.

Mayor Charlene Lovett held that the fault lay in a lack of an updated social media policy. The policy committee was tasked with looking into creating such a policy. However, at the May 23 council meeting the council decided such a policy would be unenforceable.

The mayor is now drafting language to update the City of Claremont Code of Conduct for city councilors and will submit this to the council at its next meeting, June 12.

Lovett had requested input from the city attorney on a possible social media policy, and brought the attorney’s recommendation back to the council. Those recommendations largely dealt with official city business being conducted via email, and how to avoid violations of the Open Meetings Law.

“We could have a stand-alone social media policy, or update the code of conduct to include social media,” said Lovett.

However, the councilors felt enough money had been spent.

“I’m not interested in spending any more taxpayer dollars to go down this road,” said Councilor Nick Koloski. Assistant Mayor Allen Damren and Councilor Andrew O’Hearne agreed.

Koloski went on to say that councilors are sworn in at the beginning of their term, and thus commit themselves to a certain standard of behavior. “There are certain things you abide by, or are supposed to abide by,” he said. “That being said, I don’t think there’s any way to enforce what someone does on their personal social media account.”

Koloski is the most active of the council members on social media, and said he prides himself on engaging with the public.

Stone said he’d called a lawyer himself. “You can’t stifle freedom of speech, plain and simple,” he said.

“That’s not the purpose of this,” said Councilor Abigail Kier. “A code of conduct is not a legal document. It’s not binding. This is just a guidance to address those issues we didn’t have 15 years ago.”

Kier said the issues were separate and the move to censure Stone “over and done.”

Stone objected again. “You can’t draw everything into the code of conduct.”

“These are suggested guidelines that have nothing to do with limiting someone’s freedom of speech,” said Lovett. “This doesn’t require further legal counsel.”

Scott Pope and O’Hearne talked about procedures at the State House in Concord.

“If you do something on social media as an elected representative, you can be censured,” said O’Hearne. “We just had training on harassment and diversity. I would suggest instead of changing the code of conduct we have trainings.”

“I would agree about getting training for [not committing] harassment,” said Pope. He disagreed that a code of conduct has no teeth: “I am very familiar with having a code of conduct in my profession [teaching]. It does, in fact, limit what I can say, both up here and on my Facebook page. I can lose my certification. I can lose my job for violating it. I also know there are employers who fire employees for posting things.”

“I think we should have harassment training early in the [elected] term before things go awry,” said Pope.

Lovett said she would look into getting harassment training for councilors, and also draft something on social media for the code of conduct. “If you guys like it, you do, and if you don’t, you don’t.”

One person who wasn’t happy with the proceedings was Sam Killay, the private citizen whom Stone targeted on Facebook.

Killay, who attended the policy committee meeting, commented: “As per the consulting attorney’s opinion, most of this social media stuff can only pertain to social media use for official purposes. But something bugs me here. What if an elected official’s private social media use betrays opinions or feelings likely to interfere with that person’s judgment in an official capacity?

Killay also objected to Stone’s involvement in deciding the policy. “I don’t know how Mr. Stone hasn’t been asked to recuse himself from the social media discussion altogether: his actions precipitated the discussion in the first place. And again, how was Mr. Stone allowed a vote on the measure to censure himself? … I find it hard to accept that we have absolutely no recourse against a rogue official who misrepresented his constituency and shamed his hometown.”