Whitewater, Wisconsin’s last Common Council meeting was held on August 17th. Part of that meeting concerned a proposal for transparency in government, with improved standards for posting meeting notices and agendas online, recording those meetings, and making the records conveniently available online for residents of Whitewater. I’ve written on this topic before. (See, for example, Beyond Paper Packets for Only a Few.)
I’ll consider only the discussion on transparency. That discussion begins at 45:55 on the recording, and continues through 1:05:45. I have embedded a video from that meeting, immediately below.
Here’s a link: http://blip.tv/file/4023240.
This video is a fine start – we can and should expand recording to other public meetings. Transparency and openness in government is valuable for many reasons, but consider just this one:
Transparency in government is about keeping citizens informed about public meetings of public officials at public expense with accurate and reliable readings. Does a community want to rely on what officials recall happened at a meeting, through mere notes, or should a community use the accurate and commonplace media of audio and video recording to assure that what was said is preserved accurately and reliably as a reference?
If people watch and record every experience of their children, relatives, and even friends, should government not record the actual words and positions of public officials in public meetings, supposedly held for the benefit of all residents?
From Whitewater’s Common Council, one heard several objections, however indirect, to the prompt adoption of the main transparency proposal.
What’s the rush? It’s all around us — in a city whose municipal administration would have made better decisions had there been a more transparent government years ago. I am convinced that this is true: that widespread awareness of the content of proposals would first have elicited more public comment, and those comments would have prevented so many closed-group decisions that plague us now.
No matter how intoxicating it may be for a small group of career managers to hear only their own voices, their decisions cannot be as sound as those informed by the opinions from among the thousands in this city.
No one person, no group of a dozen or so, is a match for the collective understanding of our city’s residents. Centuries of experience shows this, time and again, in place after place, and on this point one could successfully contend against any number of objections.
That’s the rush, and that would be the improvement in our quality of life — that we’ll be a more honest and practical city — than we are now. Every day delayed is a day we’re less than we could be, both in our principles and in the prudent gathering of community insight.
Committee Support. Saying that transparency depends on what committee members will prefer, as some at council did, is a gross misunderstanding. Those who who advocate inquiring of committee members think they’re being sensible, considerate, whatever. In fact, it only shows how confused they are about governance. These are not private committees and private topics, but public ones. Those who have volunteered for a public body, organized under law, shouldn’t be in a position to object, ‘we’d like a less transparent and less accurate way to memorialize our proceedings, please.’
Note, also, that any citizen may record open session public meetings, in audio or video. Wisconsin law allows, and encourages, the practice:
Use of equipment in open session. Whenever a governmental body holds a meeting in open session, the body shall make a reasonable effort to accommodate any person desiring to record, film or photograph the meeting. This section does not permit recording, filming or photographing such a meeting in a manner that interferes with the conduct of the meeting or the rights of the participants.
Wis. Stat. sec. 19.90.
A person who sought, using conventional means, to record an open session meeting would be within his or her rights under our law. That’s not just true for Council meetings, but for those of committees and commissions, too. Attempts to prevent conventional recording would be a violation of Wisconsin law, and would justify legal action against a Wisconsin municipality.
Members of a committee may have an opinion on what they’d like, but as they have no veto against private citizens’ recording of open session meetings, so they would have no legal recourse should the City of Whitewater choose to adopt a more open and honest approach. (Whitewater is not required to adopt a more accurate means of memorializing a meeting; she may not, however, prevent a resident from doing so.)
Public Support. Asking a community that’s been denied a more open politics if it’s clamoring for one is like asking a horse you’ve starved if he feels like galloping around. You might expect that it will take a while for interest to return. An at-large council member in Whitewater can win city-wide office with only several hundred votes in a city of fourteen-thousand. It’s lawful to govern this way, but hardly evidence of popular support. A small clique of a few hundred insiders is not — and never will be — the whole city.
It’s just an expression of temerity for those who have so wearied and exhausted this community to contend that they need to measure popular support. Our leading bureaucrats have so alienated this community than they can only get a retiree or two to show up — at a retirement house — for a community budget meeting.
When they say ‘popular support’ they may be thinking about a few, but they cannot plausibly mean the community.
(This is an opportunity to consider the last so-called community survey that Whitewater’s municipal administration trumpeted as evidence of popular support. I’ll address that flawed survey tomorrow, on Wednesday morning, September 1st, and demonstrate that it shows not popular support, but false bureaucratic claims.)
Cost. I am sure that it’s fair to know the cost of preserving public meetings. Two points are worth making. First, it should not require the very best equipment, but only what’s adequate. Nothing need be gold-plated. Ordinary equipment can produce fine results.
Second, if this proposal is found too costly for the city’s budget, then it’s fair to ask: will it have been less worthy than each and every item that the city does fund? One would be right to list every larger approved expenditure, or smaller ones combined, and say: Was each worth more than transparency?
Soon enough, transparency like this will be the standard across Wisconsin. We’ve much to gain by adopting these measures at the earliest opportunity.