 editorial, Wed, July 15th, 2009 Bethlehem 2.0 When the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, the procedure was not Web-cast. It was not uploaded to YouTube, and news of its occurrence was not blast e-mailed to a listserv of presubscribed technophiles. In fact, by most historic accounts, it took one draft of the document nearly a month to reach most of the signers whose names appear on it. As of this writing, the most recent minutes from the Bethlehem Town Board on the town’s Web site are from the June 10 meeting; the most recent Planning Board minutes are from June 16. About a month — and two other Town Board meetings — has gone by since those meetings. That’s about the same amount of time it took Colonial Americans to disseminate the most important document in our nation’s history to the people who would sign it. Recently, Councilman Sam Messina proposed some initiatives that would alleviate the problems of expedience and accessibility when it comes to town information. Messina proposed conducting a handful of Town Board meetings in different parts of town; Web-casting the meetings live on the Internet; providing more information on the agenda; and providing the public with electronic access to attachments to agenda items available to board members. The rest of the board balked at the cost of these programs. One board member threw out a price tag of $60,000 to Web-cast and archive video. In an era where 65,000 people are uploading videos to YouTube every day without any cost to them, that number seems a bit high. There were also concerns over the logistics and legality of uploading video to publicly shared video-hosting site. Well, the content of a public meeting is in the public realm and you cannot — and should not — stop people from re-using public meeting content. So while the Town Board hashes out who’s going to hold the camera, we at The Spotlight are happy to assist with the problem of turning those minutes around more quickly by providing them with a useful tool: the law. New York state’s Open Meetings Law includes direction concerning the minimum contents of minutes and the time within which they must be prepared. Specifically, §106 states that: “Minutes of meetings of all public bodies shall be available to the public in accordance with the provisions of the freedom of information law within two weeks from the date of such meetings except that minutes taken pursuant to subdivision two hereof shall be available to the public within one week from the date of the executive session.” Based upon that information, it is clear that minutes must be prepared and made available within two weeks. That’s two weeks quicker than the Declaration of Independence. CATEGORY: General Society
TAGS: Bethlehem, town, web, youtube blog comments powered by Disqus  |
         |
