A state board has found that the Calvert County Board of County Commissioners violated Maryland’s Open Meetings Act by failing to post three sets of meeting minutes online, but it said it could not determine whether the commissioners gave the public enough notice of a hastily called 2024 meeting about data center legislation.
The Maryland Open Meetings Compliance Board issued its opinion Sept. 21 in response to complaints from residents against the county commissioners and the Calvert County Planning Commission. The board rejected most of the other allegations and said several were outside its authority because they didn’t involve meetings.
The ruling is at least the second open meetings opinion against Calvert’s commissioners in recent months. In August, the state board found that the commissioners gave the public inadequate descriptions before closing meetings to the public.
The minutes violation
The Open Meetings Act requires public bodies to post minutes or recordings of open sessions online “to the extent practicable.” When a body closes a meeting, its open-session minutes must include a summary of the closed session: the time, place and purpose, how each member voted to close it, the legal authority for closing it, the topics discussed, who was present and any actions taken.
One complainant said the commissioners failed to prepare minutes for numerous closed sessions from 2024 through April 2026. The county said summaries for all of them were online. The state board found summaries for all but three closed sessions, held Feb. 4, Feb. 11 and Sept. 30, 2025.
When board staff asked about those three, the county said they had not been posted “[d]ue to an administrative oversight.” The county has since posted them. The board still found a violation, because posting them sooner had been practicable.
A meeting posted 42 minutes before it began
The notice complaint involved a special meeting the commissioners held at 7 p.m. on April 3, 2024.
The county told the board the meeting involved an issue “of some urgency,” tied to the General Assembly’s timeline on a House floor amendment to Senate Bill 1, legislation the board described as related to data centers. The commissioners had written to Gov. Wes Moore and legislative leaders opposing the amendment on April 1, 2024, and sent a second letter on April 4, after the meeting.
According to the county, the clerk began preparing the agenda between 4 and 4:30 p.m. on April 3. It was published to the county website’s “Meetings on Demand” page at 4:46 p.m. It went up on the “Agendas and Minutes” page, which sends alerts to subscribers, at 6:18 p.m., 42 minutes before the meeting began.
The Open Meetings Act doesn’t set a minimum notice period, and it allows short-notice meetings when urgent issues require them. The board said the test is whether the public body gave notice “as soon as is practicable” after it set the date, time and place. If the commissioners set the meeting shortly before the clerk started the agenda, the short notice “may well have satisfied the Act,” the board wrote. But if they had set it earlier, for example on the morning of April 2, the board said it “would likely find that the body violated the Act.”
The county’s response didn’t say when the commissioners settled on the meeting details, so the board said it couldn’t decide.
The board also noted that the complaint came more than two years after the meeting, and that the missing information “may well have been lost to time.” It encouraged complainants to focus on “a public body’s current practices or recent conduct.”
Cleared on agendas
The board found no violations involving agendas.
One complainant said they couldn’t find agendas for the commissioners’ Feb. 21, 2024, and Feb. 18, 2025, meetings or for two Planning Commission meetings. The board said the law doesn’t require public bodies to keep agendas available after a meeting, and it found the agendas online anyway.
Complainants also objected that a presentation by an Amazon Web Services representative at the commissioners’ March 3, 2026, meeting wasn’t on the published agenda. The commissioners added it after the meeting started. The presiding officer explained that the county hadn’t confirmed the presentation until about 6 p.m. the night before, after the agenda was already public. The board said the law allows agendas to be amended to add items that weren’t known when the agenda was published.
A complaint that the commissioners voted April 7, 2026, on a motion about a data center moratorium without saying on the agenda that a vote would be taken had already been addressed in an earlier opinion, the board said, so it did not consider it again.
The board also found video recordings online for the commissioners’ Feb. 21, 2024, and Feb. 18, 2025, meetings, and for Planning Commission meetings on Dec. 30, 2024, and Jan. 15, 2025. That meant no violation on complaints that those meetings had no minutes or recordings.
Outside the board’s reach
Two complaints fell outside the law, the board said.
One challenged the Board of County Commissioners president’s signing of confidentiality agreements with two companies. The Open Meetings Act “does not speak to the powers of an individual member of a public body acting outside of a meeting,” the board wrote, quoting its earlier opinion involving the commissioners. That earlier opinion addressed whether the full board complied with the law when it acted on one of the agreements. The new opinion does not name the companies.
The other complaint said state permits were filed for a proposed data center in Calvert County “without proactive public notice by the County.” Because that complaint didn’t involve a meeting, the board said it wasn’t the board’s to review.
A year of data center fights
The complaints grew out of Calvert County’s fight over data centers. In May, Amazon proposed a 2.4-million-square-foot data center campus at the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Lusby. Amazon dropped the plan in August. By then, commission President Todd Ireland, Vice President Mark C. Cox Sr. and Commissioner Earl F. “Buddy” Hance had all lost their June Republican primaries to challengers who opposed the county’s direction on data centers.
On Aug. 18, the commissioners unanimously approved a six-month moratorium on new data center development.
What happens next
The compliance board is advisory. It can’t impose penalties or overturn decisions. Under state law, a public body found in violation must announce the opinion at its next open meeting and have a majority of its members sign a written acknowledgment of it.
The three-member compliance board is chaired by Runako Kumbula Allsopp. The full opinion, 20 OMCB Opinions 288, is available through the Office of the Attorney General.
