This is the fifth post in my series on the Whitewater Police and Fire Commission. The first post was an introduction to the series, and the second post cited the authority of our PFC under Wisconsin law. The third post suggested reasonable standards for Whitewater’s PFC. The fourth post discussed meeting minutes.
Let’s consider PFC performance by a few reasonable standards, standards that almost anyone should readily accept. (I will consider the citizen complaint process separately.)
The commission should fulfill its legislative mandate. Meetings are not a gift to the community; they are a requirement of the law for the welfare of the community. If other reasonable standards are not being met, then the legal protections that a real and robust PFC offers are not realized. It’s not as though someone failed to score a run at a community softball tournament; it’s far more than that.
Of all the meetings with minutes available, most last for less than one-hour, despite listing several serious topics for each meeting. Consider these brief encounters with oversight:
2/2/05 — 7:05 PM start to 7:38 PM adjournment.
5/14/05 — 7:03 PM start to 7:33 PM adjournment.
8/24/05 — meeting listed on city website without minutes — it was actually cancelled (as the minutes of the 11/16/05 meeting reveal)
11/16/05 — 7:00 PM start to 7:45 adjournment.
2/13/06 — meeting listed on city website without minutes – it was actually cancelled (as is clear from the subsequent 5/10/06 minutes, that refer to the prior meeting as 11/16/05).
5/10/06 — 7:00 PM start to 7:46 PM adjournment.
7/11/06 — 7:00 PM start to 8:35 PM adjournment. Finally a meeting over one hour! Yet, this meeting had a closed session portion to interview an applicant. Much of the time was interviewing, not a public meeting.
8/23/06 — 7:00 start to 9:05 PM adjournment. Only PFC meeting in the last three years’ time that resembles other ordinary civic board meetings in length.
8/30/06 — 6:30 start to 6:45 adjournment. The meeting went into closed session from 6:37 to 6:42, after which Chief Coan was reappointed, after having only recently resigned, taken a job elsewhere, and then returned to Whitewater. That’s right — reappointing a chief who left and then returned with a matter of weeks took the Whitewater PFC only five minutes to decide. A discussion of his sudden desire to return should have taken more than five minutes — a mere one minute per PFC member.
That’s not deliberation; it’s a rushed, embarrassing exercise in abdication of serious debate. How did the PFC measure the time it took to deliberate Coan’s reappointment? I don’t know, but an egg timer would have worked.
I could continue this way, but the point’s clear enough — historically, these meetings are so brief they’re a mere formality, not a practical matter of oversight.
The commission’s meetings should begin at a fixed, regular, and published time, so that citizens can reliably attend. Our PFC does not meet at on a consistent, regular basis. Look at the dates during which the City of Whitewater website says that the PFC has met; there’s nothing regular and predicable about these times.
2/2/05, 5/5/05, 8/24/05, 11/16/05, 2/13/06, 5/10/06, 7/11/06, 8/23/06, 8/30/06, 11/01/06, 2/7/07 (cancelled), 3/21/07, 5/23/07, 9/05/07.
Some of these are regular meetings, some are special meetings, but there’s no easy pattern for a citizen to follow. Other City of Whitewater meetings — including commission and board meetings — are held on a predictable schedule. The schedule of PFC meetings is a guessing game by comparison.
The commission should produce useful and thorough minutes of its meetings.
Most of the minutes from the PFC are now on the web — feel free to review them for yourselves. They completely lack the character of minutes, in which topics raised are listed, and the content of the discussion, and who raised different points, is listed. Instead, the so-called minutes look like mere agenda items. As I’ll contend tomorrow, televising these meetings without a genuine and reliable citizen complaint process would be the worst possible step. The best step is to have genuine minutes that are more than line items saying “Discussion of…” or “Update on…” with nothing more than the mere topic itself. What was said? Who said it? What were the reasons for a given position? Those are useful minutes.
The nature and role of the commission should be listed in the same places as all other community information. Here, the PFC looks like most other City of Whitewater boards and committees; its entry on the city website is about the same as, for example, the fountain committee or the tree commission.
Perhaps, just perhaps, some commissions and boards should receive more prominent notice. I’d suggest the PFC as one of them.
Information about the commission should be clear and easy to understand. I think that the PFC falls short in this regard. The municipal website lists that the PFC schedules meetings quarterly; it would be better if it held meetings quarterly. There’s also no explanation of a citizen complaints process. (I will post on that separately, tomorrow.)
Information about the commission should be available in the principal languages spoken in the
community. Months ago, I suggested that some translation tool be available to make the city website more accessible. My suggested automatic translation tool might not have been the best for the city, but some of these pages should be translated, even if manually. The last census indicates that about 6% of the community is Spanish speaking; the actual percentage is likely higher. If the City of Whitewater and Whitewater Police Department is truly interested in outreach, then some pages translated into Spanish would be a good start.
Coming Tuesday: Integrity and a true citizen complaints process in our town.