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In "Mayor Hiremath And Appointed Council Member Solomon Seek To Reduce "Transparency" we wrote of a move by Mayor Hiremath and Appointed Council Member and 20112 Council Candidate Steve Solomon to eliminate the requirement of summary minutes at council and commission meetings in favor of action minutes. Summary minutes provide some, but not all of the detail regarding the meetings. Action minutes merely report the actions taken.
The reasoning put forth for this change is that video of council meetings and audio and video of council meetings and commission meetings is sufficient if people want to find out what took place at a meeting.
The Oro Valley Town Council held an open hearing on this at last night's council meeting.
Guess what? The video and audio recording of the meeting failed? So much for having these be a reliable source of information.
Three citizens, Don Bristow, Alan Dankwerth, and John Musolf spoke at the meeting. They expressed their opinion that a change to action minutes is not warranted. One brought a copy of the action minutes from a City of Tucson council meeting. The entire council meeting was summarized in one-third of a page!
Guess what? Our own Oro Valley Town Council Members had never seen "action minutes." They had no idea of what they were being asked to adopt.
John Musolf spoke of the reduction in transparency in government that this change would create.
Mayor Hiremath got unglued! He told all present that his council was quite transparent in their actions and that those in town who don't think so should meet him "half-way." We have no idea what the Mayor was talking about: Half way to what? Even his fellow council members appeared bewildered by his remarks. Perhaps the Mayor simply does not understand that transparency is a concept. Your actions either are or are not such. We have no idea of where "half-way" is.
The Council decided to table the measure until they actually saw what an "action" report is! Gee. You would think that the Mayor would have thought of this before putting it on the agenda! We wonder; How many other decisions in which the Mayor has participated have been so ill-conceived?
The plan is to discuss it at the January 18 council meeting.
This meeting will be a "whopper" as the discussion of parcel F-I is also on that agenda.
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