Vienna Government: Dirt Under the Nails
The Town of Vienna pays their Town Clerk and assorted members of the Zoning Department for up to two days of their work week to transcribe Town meetings to an "edited" form (not verbatim). What does this mean? What is the point?
When the Town of Vienna has a meeting they make an audio tape of the meeting. At that point it would seem like the sensible thing to do would be to dump the tape to the internet so everyone can hear and simply make that tape the official minutes of the meeting. Does the Town do that? No. The Town, as mentioned, uses their staff time, spending thousands upon thousands of excess and wasteful dollars, to transcribe meeting tapes (town staff listening and typing) to an edited down form of what actually happened in the meeting. Make sense? Of course not. Why do they do this?
The Town refuses to make the verbatim minutes of their meetings the official minutes since this gives Maud and Jane an after the fact opportunity to "edit" what actually happened. They can sanitize away anything they don't like and create an artificial record. Is this dirty, unethical and corrupt? Yes. Is it the core of Seeman and Robinson's cookbook to hold onto power? You bet.
The Vienna Way
Comments
What should they do for the hearing-impaired? Make the entire tapes available on the web AND transcribe the ENTIRE tape (so that they are not discriminating against the hearing-impaired)?
Posted by: The Internet | December 18, 2008 06:54 PM
The issue is accuracy.
Posted by: Wrong | December 18, 2008 07:47 PM
Vienna politics as usual. Other towns either post their "minutes" as complete audio tapes of the meeting or complete video tapes. It's easy to lie when you don't have to keep proof around of what you are actually trying to hide.
Example:
http://naples.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=4
See how it's supposed to be done...
http://naples.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=4&clip_id=1053
Posted by: Hmm | December 22, 2008 06:52 AM
Meeting minutes are supposed to summarize important points of a meeting. If you want the meeting transcribed, verbatim - that's different.
I noticed in a secretarial guidebook, they provided the following guide on taking minutes at meetings:
"Don’t make the mistake of recording every single comment. Concentrate on getting the gist of the discussion and taking enough notes to summarize it later. Think in terms of issues discussed, major points raised and decisions taken."
So, are you claiming that the minutes are edited and misrepresent the issues discussed, points, decisions?
Regardless, taping would be more accurate and eliminate the need minutes all together now wouldn't they.
Posted by: Ofcwkr | December 22, 2008 11:32 AM
The minutes are indeed edited to represent something different than what actually happens.
Posted by: Wrong | December 23, 2008 12:30 PM
The written minutes are already "discriminating" against the visually impaired. What we need is a system that works best for most of the town. I believe that the best system for everyone is to have the meetings recorded on video. This allows people to hear and see what is going on at a meeting and both are important.
Many times when I check minutes and agendas for the various boards, they aren't even posted, sometimes months after the meeting took place. The agendas for the town council are much better, but even those could have better descriptions and more attachments. Last town council meeting there was a new building proposed for. Church Street, but no plans were posted showing the proposed building.
Posted by: Smart Growth Advocate | December 29, 2008 07:43 PM
Smart Growth Advocate you are asking Vienna politicians who sought to ban cameras to use cameras. Not very logical.
Posted by: HV | December 30, 2008 11:05 PM