No more excuses. Every town and city council, every school committee and state board, is now on notice about meeting notices.

On June 3, Attorney General Peter F. Kilmartin’s office issued an opinion saying the state Board of Elections violated the state Open Meetings Act because its Feb. 27 meeting agenda did not adequately tell the public what the board was up to.

The opinion came in response to a complaint by Moderate Party founder Ken Block, who’s now running for governor. He noted the agenda indicated the board might vote on “election legislation,” but it failed to summarize what the bills would do, provide bill numbers or even say how many bills the board would discuss. He called the notice “defectively generic.”

Now, aside from being a great name for a band, “defectively generic” is an accurate description of many meeting notices, not just those of the Board of Elections. Given the choice between offering bare bones information (BBI) or too much information (TMI), too many government officials make BBI their SOP (standard operating procedure). That needs to STOP.

“The purpose of requiring specificity in an agenda is to give notice to the public about what may or may not be done in their name,” Common Cause Rhode Island executive director John M. Marion said Wednesday. “Few people have the time to attend public meetings. And if the agenda is ‘defectively generic,’ that defeats the purpose of the advance-notice requirement.”

Marion hailed the attorney general’s opinion, saying the Board of Elections “has a history of poor behavior when it comes to public meetings.” And he said an April 2 state Supreme Court ruling (Anolik v. Newport Zoning Board of Review) “goes pretty far in defining how specific an agenda should be.”

But he and others question why the attorney general did not send a stronger message by going to court to seek a fine. “We rely on the power of the attorney general to send that message, and it is unfortunate they didn’t in this case,” Marion said.

Spokeswoman Amy Kempe said the attorney general’s office will pursue fines for knowing or willful violations, but it found no such evidence in this case. She said Kilmartin’s office has filed four Open Meetings Act lawsuits since he took office in 2011. The most recent opinion contains a “pretty stern reminder,” she said. “I hope the Board of Elections and other public bodies read it and learn something from it.”

Block called the meeting notice “purposefully vague,” saying, “That was not an ‘Oopsie.’ ” The Board of Elections “has miserably failed to be transparent,” so “a slap on the wrist is not going to do it,” he said.

Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s local affiliate, said a preliminary search turned up 123 Open Meetings Act violations from 1999 to 2011 but just three lawsuits by attorneys general in that period. “The Open Meetings Law has looked good on paper, but for over a decade it was not a priority for attorneys general,” he said.

Brown said you can argue about whether this violation was knowing or willful, “but with the most recent Supreme Court decision, every public body should examine its practices. My guess is many are doing the same thing the Board of Elections was doing, and there needs to be vigorous enforcement.”

No more excuses.