PROVIDENCE — On his way out the door, Secretary of State Matthew Brown has given state lawmakers a D grade for compliance with the law intended to keep government meetings open to the public.

Among the findings contained in a report issued yesterday by Brown’s office:

•House committees complied with the 48-hour advance notice requirements in the state’s Open Meetings Law only 57 percent of the time during the six-month legislation session that ended in late June – and that was a slight improvement over last year’s 52 percent score.

•Senate compliance dropped from 76 percent in 2005 to 67 percent.

•At 63 percent, this year’s overall score for the General Assembly was the lowest since 1998, when former Secretary of State James Langevin, who is now Rhode Island’s 2nd District congressman in Washington, issued “Access Denied: Chaos, Confusion and Closed Doors,” the first in a series of annual reports on legislative compliance with this centerpiece of the state’s open-government laws.

By posting no notice of a meeting, or posting a notice that goes up so late that few see it in time, a legislative committee can effectively eliminate all but lobbyists and other insiders from involvement at key points in the legislative process.

Anyone who frequents the State House knows that there comes a point in the final days and weeks of every legislative session when all the rules go out the window and committee meetings are held on a balcony at a moment’s notice.

Up until then, lawmakers generally follow the same open-meeting and notice requirements that they have imposed on hundreds of other public bodies throughout state and local government since 1976.

The Senate’s Democratic leaders had no immediate comment on the report issued by the rarely-seen Brown, who did not run for reelection and fell off the political radar screen after aborting his failed campaign for U.S. Senate last spring.

But House spokesman Larry Berman said: “Every year the secretary of state’s report is filled with inaccuracies.”

As examples, he said the House would routinely post notices on Fridays of meetings scheduled for the following Tuesday, on its own bulletin board in the State House basement and its own Web site, but the secretary of state’s office did not acknowledge the notices until they were officially stamped as received by the state library the following Monday. Berman cited three instances in which the House Corporations Committee — which handles a wide array of business and health-insurance related bills — had gotten a dart for its late-Friday postings.

But the secretary of state’s analysis found that particular committees, on occasion, posted far more bills on a single evening’s agenda than House rules allow, and, worse, posted rolling multiday calendars that make it impossible for anyone — outside the ranks of plugged-in professional lobbyists — to know which day a bill might actually come up for a hearing.

In such cases, the report rapped the lawmakers for violating both the letter and the spirit of the law. And some got off relatively easy.

In mid-March, for example, the House Committee on Health, Education & Welfare posted an eight-page agenda containing 38 bills that covered a wide range of issues, including pets, teachers, the length of the school year, childcare providers, seatbelt and helmet laws — and the “Rhode Island Death with Dignity Act.” The explanation: many bills were only scheduled for votes.

That meeting didn’t even make the list because, Brown staffer Peter Kerwin said, without actually having a staffer there, it could not easily be determined how many of the bills had been rewritten and voted upon in previously unseen ways and how many fell within the exclusion to the 25-bill limit within the House’s own rules.

The House rule says: “No committee shall hear more than 25 bills (exclusive of city and town bills and those to be placed on the consent calendar).” Kerwin was unable to find a comparable Senate rule.

On the House side, the lowest scores went to the Separation of Powers Committee, which had a 22 percent compliance record, and the House Judiciary Committee, with a 28 percent score. (The House Veterans Committee only met twice and blew the technical posting requirements on one of those two occasions.) The highest score —74 percent — went to the House Finance Committee.

On the Senate side, the lowest score went to the Senate Education Committee and the highest to the Senate Government Oversight Committee.