The Doña Ana County Board of Commissioners was scheduled to vote today on whether to hire outside help to transcribe verbatim minutes of its meetings. Commissioners delayed the vote to give staff time to figure out how to pay for it, but four of five commissioners said they support the idea.
It’s a good plan that has history in county government, which I rehashed last week, so I won’t go into details again here.
Some comments from today’s meeting made me decide to share a vision for how the county and other governments can increase accessibility and citizen participation in the information age.
The county currently records audio of meetings and keeps minutes that meet the literal requirements of the New Mexico Open Meetings Act – they include the substance of proposals and records of how each commissioner voted. The minutes don’t contain the substance of any discussion, and meetings often drag on for hours, making listening to recordings impractical.
In the past, I’ve requested copies of recordings of meetings only to find some had vanished, erasing all record of the discussion behind important policy decisions.
The plan to pay a court reporter to transcribe meetings would cost $1,000 per meeting – about $24,000 to $35,000 per year, depending on how many meetings are held, county Attorney John Caldwell told the commission. He suggested that commissioners consider instead spending a little less than half that in one-time costs to purchase computer software that would place a marker at the start of each agenda item on audio recordings to make those easier to navigate.
That, coupled with the summary minutes already being produced by the clerk’s office, might be a cheaper alternative,
Commissioner Bill McCamley went further, telling his peers that he believes the current system is “fine.”
“I don’t see the need to spend money on this process,” McCamley said.
I do.
The current system is “fine” in that it meets the requirements of the law. It also provides a good enough record (except when audio recordings vanish) so that, should an investigation or legal dispute arise, lawyers and those they employ can spend hours and a lot of money transcribing recordings.
But it doesn’t help, in any way, people who want to be involved in their government but lead busy lives and can’t attend meetings. Isn’t making government more accessible a worthy use of taxpayer money?
The Internet is the answer
Used properly, the Internet allows for all sorts of possibilities for busy Americans to be involved in their government, and it doesn’t cost much.
The ideal, in my view, would be for a local government like the county to broadcast its meetings on the Internet – video if possible, audio if not.
The government should archive those recordings so they can be accessed on the Internet at any time. In addition, the government should keep verbatim minutes. As Commission Chairwoman Karen Perez pointed out at today’s meeting, it takes a lot of time to listen to a recording of a meeting, but skimming through verbatim minutes is often a reasonable alternative.
Those minutes should be posted and archived on the government’s Web site alongside notices of and agendas for upcoming and past meetings.
In addition, the site should include biographies of each elected policymaker and ways to contact them.
Many local governments have implemented some of these features. The City of Las Cruces does all of these except make minutes of meetings easy to find on the Internet.
Imagine what doing all of that would mean. The professional who has to work during the meeting time, the mother who can’t check in on the meeting until after she’s put her 3-year-old to bed, the realtor who owns property in Doña Ana County but lives in New York, and the Chaparral resident who’s concerned about the proposed landfill in his backyard but can’t make the drive to Las Cruces could all have immediate access to what’s going on with the government, as long as they have access to the Internet.
It’s worth the small cost
Unlike requesting copies of minutes or recordings from the clerk’s office, accessing those records online would be free. It would also save the county time and resources needed to respond to records requests and make copies.
Say the high-end estimates are accurate, and it would cost $35,000 per year to keep verbatim minutes and $15,000 to buy the software.
How much would it cost to put verbatim minutes and archives of audio recordings on the Web site? Not a lot. Once the minutes are produced, it’s a simple copy-and-paste process to put them online. The county has its own programmers who could build a site that would automatically archive such files.
Then such records could be accessed day or night online and, in addition, people could listen live to meetings from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.
That’s the kind of access that truly helps people participate in their government.
The county just spent well over $100,000 on the spaceport tax election – one of countless important issues the commission will tackle this year. If the election was worth that much, aren’t all the other issues worth a little investment – one that will truly help people squeeze government involvement into their busy lives?
Any decision the county makes on this issue should have that as the goal.