Roughly half of Door County municipalities–eight out of 19–post full meeting packets on their website. The rest are available upon request to the respective clerk or town office.
When the Town of Gibraltar recently announced its decision to no longer post full packets online, they cited “the safety of both residents and the Town’s cyber systems” as the reason.
The town and some of its vendors received scam invoices and fee requests recently, Town Clerk Laura Reetz explained. Phishing scammers scrub municipal websites looking for information to construct fake invoices, letters and solicitations, she said.
Specifically, a recent Plan Commission packet included a petition for a zoning variance–a common document in planning and zoning packets–and online scammers used the information to create a fake invoice for a nonexistent $5,000 fee from the Town of Gibraltar, and sent it to town vendors. The invoices look very official, she said.
Gibraltar is not the only municipality targeted by these scams, she added. Reetz’s Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association social media chat has discussed the proliferation of these scams, she said, and the Wisconsin Department of Trade and Consumer Protection released a consumer alert in January about them.
Some of the other municipalities with packets by request only cited similar concerns about scams, as well as unwanted solicitation.
“We do receive a lot of spam and solicitors due to documents we place publicly. We have also found that information can be misconstrued by releasing documents,” Town of Baileys Harbor Clerk Haley Adams said.
Clerks who responded to questions said they are committed to government transparency, and municipalities must weigh transparency and access with security.
“I’m happy to email (the packet) to anyone,” Reetz said. “I’m just not putting it out there where any bad actor could grab the info.”