Thursday, January 20, 2011

Letter to Council 1/20/11

Below is a copy of an email I sent earlier today to all members of the City Council, the Mayor and the City Manager. If any of them decide to respond I'll be happy to post the response(s) here, without editing it(them).




This email is being sent to the City Council, Mayor and City Manager

Just prior to the end of the recent PW & Safety Committee meeting, Messrs. Sandifer & Vaught thought to mention the importance of the NLC conference with regards to info about audio capture of meetings.

Immediately following their comments, the committee Chair, Ms Kuhn, advised that there would be no comments about any items that were not on the agenda. What I wanted to say at that time would have been relevant, but decided not to push it.

The record needs to be set straight. Or, shall I say a reminder.

At the 11/8/10 City Council meeting these same items (method of preserving and communicating meeting minutes) came up after previously being reviewed by the PW&S committee.

Various items were then presented at that council meeting, to include the use of audio similar to the way Fairway was doing it. And, yes, it was me that brought that up. At that time, because of that and other info, Mr Neighbor moved that the item be tabled until staff had reviewed the additional info. This can be confirmed with the item in the Shawnee Dispatch from 11/10/2010 at:


http://www.shawneedispatch.com/news/2010/nov/10/council-delays-vote-cutting-minutes/

I bring this up, because the use of audio was brought up well in advance of the NLC conference. Naturally, I wouldn't expect either Messr. Sandifer or Vaught to mention that. Especially considering who brought it up. I will concede that the info from the NLC conference did show other methods of audio capture which could be better than the one currently employed by Fairway. The question is: If the item had not been tabled because of citizen input would the city even have looked at the audio concepts at the NLC conference? And if yes, to what extent?

Ray Erlichman