Minutes & Public's Right to Know

[Dr.Ken Sokolowski]

{Background: The "Rules and Procedures" subcommittee of the Town Councikl met and discussed changing the format of the minutes of the Town Council and those of the other Boards and Commissions to that which is used in Rocky Hill. The subcommittee "recommended" that such a proposal be presented to Council for consideration and possible action Monday evening 12/19/2005; it was endorsed by the Manager and apparently the Town Clerk. The following is a transcript of my public comments to Council that evening.}

PUBLIC COMMENTS TO TOWN COUNCIL
during its regular meeting of 12/19/2005

Ken Sokolowski
Wethersfield

Earlier during this autumn, I read an article in a pervasive local newspaper entitled "Man Ends Claim of Town FOI Violations".(1) It prompted me to visit the website of the Town of Rocky Hill.

I wanted to see for myself how that town handled their minutes on their website.(2) What I found was very disturbing. I was tempted to address this Council publicly in order to praise our fair Town of Wethersfield, the Town Clerk's office and the services of the webmaster(3) for the valuable service they provide in the production and eventual publication of the minutes of the Town Council, both in hardcopy and online. I wish I had made the time back then to do so.

In Ms. Therrien's letter to Russ Morin [today's date] regarding a "Change to Town Council Minute Format" she claims that her recommended change in format "will help to streamline the process and make minutes more quickly available to our citizens."

I am not convinced that the public will be so served if the Rocky Hill "format" were to be implemented. I do not believe that adequate consideration has been given to this very important question, despite the nominal approval of the Council's subcommittee on "Rules and Procedures" - comprised of only three Councilors!

I have reviewed a broad sample of the minutes of the to-date 2005 minutes of the Town Boards and Commissions on the Town's website. With rare exception, the minutes of these meetings have been created by a designated, volunteer member of each board or commission. Exceptions can be found when the minutes are taken and prepared by an already paid member of the Town administration or his / her staff.

Sometimes there is no indication in the published minutes (approved or unapproved) of who served as the secretary or clerk for this purpose. Despite this, the published minutes reflect a healthy level of detail about the nature of the discussions which took place. This went well beyond just a robotic, fill-in-the-blanks listing of the motions and the outcome of each vote.

This healthy level of detail is to be commended. It allows those who read the minutes at a much later time to understand the context of the motion and better appreciate the vote which ensued. To accept this proposed 'Rocky Hill format' for the minutes of our boards and commissions will deprive the public of such important legislative content and context.

In this post-Bill-Clinton era, where it is important to define what is "is," a discussion of the definition of "minutes" has not been engaged or agreed upon. To the vast majority of the Wethersfield public, the "minutes" of our public meetings are the structured and sufficiently detailed reports which tell us what transpired at our, and not just the decisions which were ultimately reached.

Minutes is an official record of the proceedings of a meeting, a written account of what transpired at a meeting, that is, its transactions. These words connote an active process and not a simple outcome. It implies the active ebb and flow of the discussion which lead to a decision (that is, the vote). To call the very limited cataloguing of motions and their votes during a meeting "the minutes" is a distortion of what the empowering public expects of their leaders.

The CT FOI statutes allows the Clerk of the Town, and the secretaries or clerks of the Town's Boards and Commissions, 48 hours to report to the public their motions and their respective votes. These cannot be truthfully called minutes.

The CT FOI statutes allow the Clerk of the Town and the secretaries or clerks of the respective boards and commissions a full 7 days to provide the public the elaborated, written minutes - that is - the sufficiently detailed proceedings and transactions of the meeting. That is more than enough time, except in special circumstances where a delay might be justifiable in the eyes of the FOIC. These are not verbatim transcriptions we are talking about.

'Working notes' are not "minutes". Some of the ersatz minutes of Rocky Hill do not even have any "working note" appended to them. How good can that be for the public?
Accepting the "Rocky Hill format" will result in a dumbing down of our Wethersfield electorate. With less information on which to intelligently base its own considerations of the Council's actions, the public will find that elections will become just another expensive beauty pageant and voting on a referendum will become just a craps shoot.

The more you keep the public from probing and policing its elected leaders, the more voter apathy there will develop. Is that really good for Wethersfield? Do you really want that to be part of your legacy?

If this change is indeed proposed this evening, I urge you to table it for further study and risk / benefit analysis.

Take the time to invite the public to ask you questions. Look beyond this stage to the broader community of 26,000 Wethersfield souls for further insight, opinions and counsel.

I contend that this proposed change is not a minor one.

You owe this to the public: learn more yourselves so that you can justify your decision to them and yourself.

=====Notes and references:=====
(1)Hartford Courant ("Man Ends Claim of Town FOI Violations" by Ann Marie Somma, October 6, 2005, Pg B-3
(2)Rocky Hill, CT
Official Website (new configuration)
Home page:
Note: REQUIRES Macromedia Flash Player
NB: cannot adjust font size on page.
Meeting Minutes: (reverse chronological order; intermixed)
www.ci.rocky-hill.ct.us/2005minutes.html
E.g. Town Council (Minutes, 12/5/2005):
www.ci.rocky-hill.ct.us/2005Minutes/tc12-5-05.pdf
Note: REQUIRES a PDF-format file reader (e.g. Acrobat)
(3)Tom Hemphill, webmaster, www.wethersfieldct.com

[oldetowne]

I will never be as eloquent as Dr. Ken, so I won't even try.

But it does strike me as offensive that the Town Council (or at least 5 of the 6 Democrats on the Town Council) continue to wage an assault on the rights of the general public.

In addition to cutting back the minutes to a meaningless list of motions and votes, they apparently refused to revisit the issue of restoring public comment at the end of Council meetings. Retaining the 11 pm curfew and adding back the right to speak at the end of Council meetings would be a compromise that serves the needs of both the sleepy, impatient Council members and the members of the public seeking to have more than one minuscule opportunity to address their elected leaders. I guess that would be too much to ask.

Instead, the Council meetings will continue to be self-serving infomercials about who serves as liaison to which committee and who attends the most public events, uninterrupted by the nastiness of citizen input, and the minutes will be purged of any of the unpleasant details that could come back to haunt any one of our vaunted solons.

[morganika]

Well the same people keep winning the elections, so I think the council feels this is what the majority wants.
This council has been secretive and deceitful, in my humble opinion, from the start, why would they be anything else after winning re-election?

[cruzrt]

The Town Council's attempts to suppress the content of meeting minutes is a critical issue that all town residents (regardless of political affiliation) need to pay close attention to. We all need to contact our Councillors to express our concerns. Those that seem to be in favor of the suppression are: Morin, Adil, Fortunato, Walsh amd Kotkin. Those who have raised objections at least to some degree are: Forrest and the 3 Republicans, Cascio, Kirsche and the 3rd who I cannot remember right now. If this goes through, then citizens will all be the losers.

[stvman]

David Drake is that other 3rd Republican. I too think this change in the minutes to eliminate everything but the votes is bad. What are the elected officials afraid of? Some of the excuses given are really lame "It's too noisy for the clerk to hear the tape". I hope that Dr. Ken and others keep this subject on the front-burner until the council majority relents.

[Dr.Ken Sokolowski]

Between now and the next council meeting (which I believe is 1/3/2005, a Tuesday), I plan to gather more information for visitors here to support my position that the current system is of healthily detailed minutes (not just 'a list of motions & votes' and perhaps(!) 'working notes' and recordings of questionable quality, availability and longevity) serves we Wethersfielders well.

I am in the midst of reviewing FOI information for CT. The following is a navigation "bar" which I adapted from the State's website section for the FOIC:www.state.ct.us/foi/. I provide it for visitors who wish to hone their FOI scalpels.

(External) Links to and within the
State of Connecticut
On-line FOIC:
Freedom of Information Commission

| FOI Act | Regulations | Citizen's Guide | Highlights of FOIA | FAQs | Final Decisions | Upcoming Speaking Engagements |Meeting Agendas & Minutes | Other Related Sites | Table of Contents |Student Page | What's New | Search |

Edited by Dr.Ken Sokolowski for this venue

Please note, these ABOVE are external links which will open a separate window, in addition to the one you are viewing this moment. If the webmaster deems this inadvisable and removes them, here is HTML coding which you can use to create your own navigation bar (with an HTML editor or, with a little tweaking, MsWord):

<p align="center">
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/">Home @/FOI</a> |
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/2001FOIA/2001FOIAStatutoryIndex.htm">FOI Act</a> |
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/Regs/regsIndex.htm">Regulations</a> |
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/1998CITIZENSGUIDE.htm">Citizen's Guide</a> |
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/FOIC_Highlights/English/FOIC_HighLightsEng.htm">Highlights of FOIA</a> |
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/Frequently_Asked_Questions.htm">FAQs</a> |
<a href="final_decs.htm">Final Decisions</a> |
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/Upcoming_Speaking_Engagements/Upcoming_Speaking_Engage.htm">Upcoming
Speaking Engagements</a> |<br>|
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/Meeting_Agendas_and_Minutes/Meeting_Agendas_and_Minutes_Index.htm">Meeting Agendas & Minutes</a> |
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/Other_Sites/Other_related_sites.htm">Other Related Sites</a> |
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/FOIWWWtoc.htm">Table of Contents</a> |
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/Students/Old%20Student%20Pages/young_citizens'.htm">Student Page</a> |
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/What's_New/What's_New_Page.htm">What's New</a> |
<a href="http://www.state.ct.us/foi/Search.htm">Search</a></small></strong> |
</p>

[Dr.Ken Sokolowski]

The following is a verbatim transcript of an email I just sent to the Clerk of the Town of Wethersfield (cc'd to the Manager). This has bearing on the matters which have been addressed in this thread so far

I have just received confirmation that the email had been received by the Manager. I will let you know how this pans out later.

---

(The subject field of the email read:
"FOI request - Official list of motions and votes, Town Council meeting (regular) 12/19/2005")


Clerk,
Town of Wethersfield
505 Silas Deane Hwy
Wethersfield, CT 06109

December 23, 2005
Friday EST: 15:00

re: List of motions and votes of Town Council

Dear Mrs. Sassano/ Dolores

I am a little confused.

I emailed you yesterday, requesting a copy of the motions and votes for the Town Council meeting of 12/19/2005, some three days ago.

According to my reading of information available on the website of the CT FOIC, this information is to be made available to the public within 48 hours of the close of the meeting. Since this document listing the motions and votes is not to be confused with nor is equivalent to the minutes of the meeting (which is allowed a full seven calendar days only since this was not a special meeting, the latter making allowances for weekends and holidays), I believe that this document from your office should be ready now.

I do appreciate that you were unable to respond to my request yesterday because you were not in the office to receive my email. Such is the chance we take when using the email medium.

I emailed you this morning, repeating this request.

You responded via email, "... list of motions and votes is unofficial since it was tabled and not acted upon".

I noted that no copy of the motions and votes was attached to your email of today's date.

Unless the Town Council meeting itself was adjourned to another specific date (I cannot recall the legal term for this maneuver), its adjournment of 12/19/2005 ended that meeting.

I plan to be in Town Hall in about a half hour and I will stop in to pick your official, FOIC compatible list as described above.

Respectfully,

Dr.Ken Sokolowski
79 Main Street
Wethersfield, CT 06109

cc: Bonnie Therrien, Manager, Town of Wethersfield, CT

[Dr.Ken Sokolowski]

I just got the "receipt" acknowledgment from the Clerk's office, time stamped: 3:59 PM EST today 12/23/2005. I am out the door to Town Hall. Stay tuned.

[Dr.Ken Sokolowski]

Well, I have been to Town Hall and back

When I got to the Clerk's office she was alone (no assistant clerks were visible). We chatted a little. She said that she had thought that she had already sent the "form" to me, but I had checked all of my various email boxes and it was not to be found; she checked her computer and apparently could not confirm that she had send what I had asked for. She produced a hard copy of the "minutes" of the Town Council meeting and not just the official list of 'motions and votes' which I had requested. I thanked her for them and offered to pay for them; she provided them gratis. We chatted a little more before I left.

It was only when I got to my car that I took the time to scan the "minutes" a little closer. Though I will comment more later (I have some really late Christmas shopping to do) I can say that the minutes of Monday's meeting were limited to only three sheets / six sides of paper. Granted, Monday's meeting was one of the most sparsely attended by the public (perhaps 6-7 citizens) and the agenda did not require much effort to dispose of all the matters.

It appears that "the powers that be" have already started to utilize a format for the minutes which is a hybrid of what the controlling party on the Council wants and what we Wethersfielders have come to expect from our leaders and the Town Hall administration. Enough said on that for now.

When I got back to the epicenter of my cyberlife, I doubled checked all of my email accounts and did not find any evidence of the form of which the Clerk had spoken. But, I did get the following email from here time stamped about 4:10 this afternoon; it read in part:

"FOI does not require that they be emailed nor posted nor placed on line, just be available within 48 hours. They were in my office on Tuesday following the meeting and available to those who wished to see them. E mail may be convenient for some people but not for everyone.'

.

(I will have to ask Scott Coleman (myrockyhill.com) how this squares with what he has learned in his jousting with the Town of Rocky Hill for information.)

So fellow Wethersfielders, the Clerk may be giving us a hint about where the Council and Town Hall Administration may be heading: less and less for the public and making what they provide even more difficult to obtain and more difficult to disseminate in this e-world.

Does this bother you? It should! It bothers me.

Time to get organized and vocal and visible if we want to maintain the appropriate balance between we the governed and our elected and hired officials.

[cruzrt]

Dr. Ken's 12/23 responses from the Town Clerk are no surprise to me, nor should they be to any citizen who has observed the way the Town Hall staff does business. I would also remind the posters that the 12/5/05 minutes were also very minimal;

[cruzrt]

Some addenda to my prior comments: the December 5th minutes have obviously been produced with a new intent. Many of the portions consist of just the canned phrase "Councillor X 'commented on'". Especially interesting is how the public comments of Mary Dobruck got treated. She politely criticized the Council for providng nothing in the last 7 months on the flooding problems that she and others experienced in May 2005. This turned into "she commented on...". Citizens must become vocal about what the Council and Clerk and Manager are doing with the minutes.

[standish]

I support every effort for open government and citizen participation. I oppose any effort which, intentionally or consequentially, curtails either. This includes the new proposal for abbreviated minutes and the old rules change regarding limited public comments. Efficiency is a useful goal in regard to government administration and expenditure, not in the political process.

[SyZyGy]

standish correctly wrote:

Efficiency is a useful goal in regard to government administration and expenditure, not in the political process.

The Town Council majority could interpret standish's comment and counter that its actions are not political but rather benign piloting of Wethersfield's administration (expenditures included).

By its very nature the Town Council is one of the most overt manifestations of a local political process designed to allow the dominant faction the opportunity to apply its own political perspective to the direction of developments in town via the administration of its government.

Consider: our local Dem's are behaving more like W,DC Republicans than W,DC Democrats.

Think about the worst examples of the W,Dc Republican's politics, personalities, plans, programs and processes (in the executive and legislative branches) as they apply to the effects on our Constitution (particularly 'the Bill of Rights'), the stewardship over our environment, the protection of the vulnerable, and actions abroad, and you will see (except in the last instant) a parallel with our local Democrats.

Our local Dem's have been involved in a self-congratulatory group-grope and love-fest for the past six months, well before the election, 2005. Like true members of a local "political class" they seek to cement their control so that their efforts and effects may be perpetuated (Remember, W,DC!).

In their now hightened state of euphoria, the Dem's are loosing sight of the fact that the process is just as important as the product.

We are not making sausage at Council meetings.

[stvman]

The manipulation of the Council Minutes has been going on longer than you'd think. At the very first meeting of the new Council in November, Councillor Adil discussed making changes to the minutes format. Somehow those comments never found their way into the minutes. Just a coincidence? Maybe........ha.ha.ha.

[SyZyGy]

stvman wrote:

At the very first meeting of the new Council in November, Councillor Adil discussed making changes to the minutes format. Somehow those comments never found their way into the minutes

You are right. I went to the Town's website to the minutes of 11/21/2005 and I Ctrl-F'd the words "minutes format", "format of minutes", "format" and "minutes" and I did not find any of them except as part of a heading and certainly nothing associated with the 3rd-Chair Adil. I did the same for the minutes of 12/5/2005 and found no reference there either.

Just think, first they will filet the minutes, and then they will remove them from the Town's website - because being there is optional.

On the televised version of the Council meeting of 12/19/2005, I heard Dr. Ken voice a concern about the potential of "dumbing down" voters in town. I am more worried about the dumbing down (for lack of good records of prior meetings) of the elected leaders, appointed commissioners and paid staff at Town Hall - if this change is allowed to take root and spread like so much kudzu in town.