Missing Minutes

While there have been dramatic changes in Mesquite's city government since the election of Mark Wier as mayor and Kraig Hafen, Al Litman, and George Rapson as councilmen, some things never seem to change.

It's pretty likely that somewhere in the venerable and secretive City Hall, someone explained for the someteenth time that "the people of Mesquite aren't very bright, they have short attention spans like Ritalin-deprived sixth graders, and they'll just forget."

This time, the conversation was surely about the city's website, and the removal of City Council meeting minutes.

Earlier in the year, the city had fallen way behind in updating the minutes online, sometimes with gaps of two to three months.

Then in April, right as the primary elections were coming down to the wire and people might be interested in researching how certain candidates voted or conducted meetings, the minutes vanished from the list of previous council meetings.

The City claimed it was a computer glitch (what else).  You know what the problem was?  According to a city official, in some instances the system was showing the "working minutes" instead of the sanitized, "approved" minutes.  Horrors!

Using that excuse, instead of taking down the handful of objectionable minutes, the city zapped them all.

Of course, the city promised the minutes would be back up a week after the primary elections, in time for the general election.

I'm not sure why, after years of lies and deceptions, I would be surprised that the city government once again misled the public.

Here it is August, four full months later, and the meeting minutes are still missing from the meeting page of the city's Sire system.  The city claims you can do a search and find the meeting minutes, but that means you have to know the topic of a particular meeting instead of just being able to click chronologically.  Also, the city website admits that, even in the searchable database, you won't find any minutes for meetings after April 11.

Apparently, it's hard to type up meeting minutes.  Despite the fact that previous City Clerks managed to stay on top of minutes for complicated council meetings that ran as long as three to four hours featuring mystifying building plans and permit approvals, our current City Clerk is just too overwhelmed by the 55-minute sessions that have been the hallmark of council meetings over the last six months.

In fact the job is so massive that, despite numerous layoffs of longtime dedicated city employees, the council voted to approve money to hire a transcription service to type up the minutes.

Only a government could get away with such incompetence.  If a business made a promise to their customers, then didn't follow through, the customers would walk away and the business would fail.  (Unless, of course, that business is Exxon or Microsoft).

This seems like a minor thing until you understand that the minutes are the most important documents maintained by any government.  It's the official record of their actions, and frequently includes information necessary for upcoming decisions, which is a little bit more important than an announcement about the World Series of Beer Pong to be held at a local casino (which happened to be on the front page of the city's website a couple of weeks ago).

With the public unable to see those online minutes, it's difficult for citizens to get up to speed on city issues, or figure out how the city got into such a mess.  Without those voting records, it's also impossible to hold their elected officials accountable because it's tough to figure out who voted for what.

Sure, there are more important tasks demanded of the city's IT department, like blocking staff's access to local news websites and counting how many times someone views a Dilbert cartoon online.  But somewhere in the city's censorship crusade, you'd think they could find time to actually fix a problem that's been lingering for more than 120 days. 

We all know this isn't the IT department's fault, or the fault of the records clerk, it's a move (or lack of a move) by City Hall's leadership.  If this was really important, like buying a new SUV to replace the "elephant" previously assigned as a mayor's vehicle, it would have been done already.

But it's just a series of official documents intended to record the history of the city government, nothing worth losing sleep over, right?.  After all, if the city continues to hide the minutes in a searchable database, eventually the people will lose interest, forget about it, and go back to sleep, which is precisely what the city government wants - peacefully sleeping sheep.