For the first time, Salem held a virtual town meeting, where residents could vote in person or watch the meeting from home and vote in real time online. How ironic, then, that at the start of the meeting on Wednesday, First Selectman Bob Ross had to tell the audience that the town's website was going kaput.

A new law went into effect Wednesday requiring all municipalities to post meeting minutes on their websites within seven days after the meeting and to post the agendas of special meetings at least 24 hours in advance. Complying with the new law is easy for towns who pay staff to post information online. But for small towns like Salem, with small staff and small budgets, the new law means one thing: an end to their websites or noncompliance.

Salem plans to start a new website next month by training staff members to post items online. New Hartford probably will shut down its website until a new and improved one goes up in a month. Lyme had taken down its website in preparation for an upgraded one, but officials decided against it as protest against the mandates of the new law. And Harwinton doesn't know what its next steps are. For now, http://harwinton.us just says the website is unavailable.

Like most small towns, the Harwinton website is updated by a volunteer and the town doesn't have the money to hire full-time staff to post information regularly on the site, First Selectman Frank Chiaramonte said.

"We thought, rather than somebody filing [a Freedom of Information Act] complaint, we decided to close it down temporarily," he said.

Town and state Freedom of Information Commission officials said the new law is confusing. The law has yet to be interpreted by the state commission, officials said, and towns can interpret it in different ways. For example, it doesn't specify whether all or just "official" town government websites have to comply. Officials also have expressed their aggravation at the state for exempting itself from the new rules, for not funding the new law to help the towns who can't afford to keep up with it, and for passing the law in June during a special session where people outside the legislature are not permitted to comment on it.

In a statement issued Thursday, James Finley Jr., the executive director of Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, said, "If it has the effect of driving some towns to close their websites, then it is having an impact opposite the intent of the legislation - it is making information less accessible to the public."