Maryland’s Open Meetings Compliance Board has found that the Calvert County Board of County Commissioners violated state transparency law a second time in as many weeks — this time over how it disclosed a 2024 closed-session discussion involving a land deal with an unnamed development company.
In an opinion dated Aug. 17, the three-member board concluded the commissioners were legally allowed to discuss the matter behind closed doors, but violated the Open Meetings Act by failing to give the public sufficiently detailed information about the discussion both before and after it happened. The board found no violation regarding a separate complaint about a data center vote earlier this year.
The case centers on an Aug. 27, 2024 closed session in which commissioners ratified a confidentiality agreement and an exclusive rights negotiating agreement with a development company, allowing the county to negotiate a land sale. The confidentiality agreement had already been signed by the Board president a week earlier, on Aug. 20, and was formally ratified during the closed meeting. The board did not name the company involved.
Before the closed session, the county disclosed only that it was invoking the legal exception covering business-recruitment discussions, without describing the topic or its reasoning — a pattern the opinion ties to the same “past practice” flagged in a separate Compliance Board opinion issued a week earlier, which found five similar violations across 2025 and April 2026. Afterward, the county’s public summary described the closed-session topic only as “Exploratory study documents subject to nondisclosure,” which the board called too vague for the public to determine whether the discussion actually fit the exception the county claimed. The board noted the county has since changed its protocol to disclose required details in advance rather than after the fact, and said companies’ identities and negotiating positions can still be protected while providing more detail than bare legal language.
Separately, the board examined an April 7, 2026 open session in which a commissioner, without the move appearing on the agenda, proposed directing staff toward a two-year ban on data center projects; the motion failed. The board found no violation, ruling the vote wasn’t a “known item” when the agenda was set.
That April vote came amid a broader, ongoing fight over data centers in Calvert County. Commissioners are set to hold a public hearing Aug. 18 on a proposed six-month moratorium on new data center site plans, roughly two weeks after Amazon Web Services withdrew its own proposal for a data center campus near the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Lusby following community opposition. Three incumbent commissioners who had opposed a moratorium lost their seats in June’s Republican primary.
The Southern Maryland Chronicle has reached out to the county for comment but had not received a response as of publishing time. If a response is received, this article will be updated.
