What Lantzville's Mayor Thinks of Your 'Need to Know'!
On Dec. 14/06, I sent the following email to the District of Lantzville's CAO, Ms. Twyla Graff, with a cc: to the Mayor:
Twyla,
You and I have discussed the use of audio recording equipment
for meetings of Council on several occasions in the past, as I was
trying to understand how residents who aren't able to attend every
meeting of Council would be able to have an easily accessed and
reliable way of obtaining the information necessary to ask
pertinent questions of their elected and appointed representatives
and to provide input on issues important to them.
Initially, it appeared to me that a number of different methods
were being used to document the proceedings - handwritten notes,
entering directly on a laptop, and also sometimes, recording on
audio tape. The past year or so, a note has been included at the
top of the Council meeting agenda to indicate that the meeting may be recorded (emphasis is mine). However, it remains unclear to me
how these different methods are to be used (separately or jointly)
to provide the most complete and accurate record of "the people's
business" here in Lantzville.
With respect to the audio tape, does the District have a policy
which governs which gatherings of Council may be recorded,
specifically how the audio recordings are used to produce the
official record (only for back-up in case of an apparent
discrepancy raised by a Council member and/or to 'fill in'
complex/long discussions?), how long each recording is kept and
how a resident of Lantzville can obtain access to a specific
recording or transcript thereof? If such a policy already exists,
where can I get a copy of it?
Thank you in advance for your kind and prompt attention to my
query. I have taken the liberty of cc'ing the Mayor on this email
since this is obviously something which would have been/needs to
be decided jointly by Council and staff in the best interests of
the residents. Perhaps it is something which will be an integral
part of the District's new 'communications strategy'.
Sincerely,
Hans J. Larsen
Having patiently waited for a response and receiving none, on Jan. 25/07, I sent the following email to Ms. Graff, again with a cc: to the Mayor:
Twyla,
Having sent you the 'attached' email on Dec. 14th with a
question relating to District Communication Policy, I was hoping
to have received a reply by now. Can you please tell me when you
will be able to provide me with clarification on the District's
policy?
Sincerely,
Hans J. Larsen
Finally, later that day, I received the following reply from the Mayor, NOT Ms. Graff:
Hans,
As you included me in the distribution of the email please accept my email as the District's response. [Blogger note: why would Ms. Graff not answer the question and why should the Mayor answer it for her?]
The one and only official record of the Council meetings is the printed minutes as approved by Council. How staff goes about making notes in order to prepare those minutes is not of concern to council. Council's only concern is the resulting minutes and Council reviews those minutes in order to determine if in the opinion of Council those minutes are a complete, fair and accurate representation of results of that meeting.
As such additions, deletions and amendments are also at the sole discretion of Council.
In respect of this, the use of laptops, written records and/or tapes is completely at the discretion of staff solely in order to assist them in preparing the draft record to Council. Subsequent to the preparation and approval of the minutes these preparation materials become irrelevant and as such may be recycled or in the case of the tapes, reused.
I trust this is the information you require.
Sincerely,
Colin Haime
While I have come to cherish any reply I can coax out of the senior managers and elected officials with the District of Lantzville, I think you will see that not all my questions were answered. As a matter of fact, the Mayor only danced around the whole issue.
As an example of how clarity could have helped, there was an incident at a regular meeting of Council back on July 25/05, where many of the people in the gallery at that meeting could swear that they heard the Mayor say that "Seaview Elementary School continues to see a decline in enrolment and will ultimately close down if it does not increase" and that is what the draft minutes prepared by Ms. Graff, then Deputy Corporate Administrator, reflected. However, after facing considerable criticism over what some called 'fear-mongering' in an attempt to justify a significant increase in density in Lantzville through the new OCP, the official and certified (by Ms. Graff and the Mayor) minutes had him saying that "Seaview Elementary School continues to see a decline in enrolment and could close down if it does not increase".
The Agenda for the meeting notes that "(t)his meeting may be recorded" but, when the controversy arose, the public were not told whether or not it had been. My point being that, if it was actually part of a procedure, it would have been and we could all have heard what was ACTUALLY said, not just what Council would wish they had said. Would this not have been an ideal situation to have had an audio record and a policy as to how it should be used to bring clarity to the people's business?
[UPDATE 09 03 27] Back in November of last year, I attempted to make use of the 'Search' feature on the District's website (realizing in advance that I would not be successful in finding anything on the Agendas, which are scanned images, not text - I had already made a suggestion to Twyla Graff, CAO, to at least make the Agenda 'Table of Contents', which is created by the District in Word format, searchable by including it as a separate item for each agenda and to which she had replied that she would take my suggestion under consideration but nothing ever happened). I was trying to determine how many times Lantzville council had gone 'in-camera', i.e, a meeting dealing with the public's business yet closed to the public. During this exercise, I discovered that the 'search' feature 'crapped out' after June 25, 2007, i.e., it could not find any 'hits' after that date (even though there clearly were some). I dutifully reported this anomaly to the Deputy Director of Corporate Administration, Donna Smith, in late November and she responded that she "had followed up with (their) website provider to rectify the problem". Imagine my surprise when I recently got back to my searching and found that, in fact, the problem still persisted. On following up with Ms. Smith, I was told that they "(had) been consumed with other more urgent priorities in the meantime". Imagine, the website provider had suggested a solution to the problem of Lanztville residents not being able to access the District's Minutes & Agendas in a timely and efficient manner and it has taken the District four months to "look into it". The District has even been awarded grants for the purposes of "website improvements" yet I can discern no such changes - if anything, the 'search' feature seems to have bombed out about the time these funds were received. [UPDATE: the new, improved website has 'sort of' taken my long-ago suggestion to heart and the base Agenda is now searchable but, since the actual Agenda is still an unsearchable image, some detective work is required to find specific details]. In my humble opinion, this is yet another way that the residents of Lantzville are being denied access to a full and complete accounting of how Council conducts business on their behalf.
Labels: Council procedures, minute-taking, minutes/agendas
posted by Vigilantz at 8:39 am
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