Increased Government Transparency

By Spencer L. Karpf

I believe that transparent government and informed citizens produce better government

Ours is a small city and not perceived as warranting the press and interest group scrutiny that larger government bodies are subject to. But small though we are, the destiny of our City and hence the quality of our lives is affected by the quality of our governing bodies.

I want to be clear that my suggesting that the actions of our City Council be more closely monitored is not born of any notion that anyone is intentionally doing anything wrong. Rather it is born of the notion that governments that are not watched seem to naturally slip into inappropriate behavior that might not occur if they were on notice that they were being more closely monitored.

But without someone looking out for us, it is hard to look out for ourselves. We all have busy schedules and monitoring through attendance at City Council meetings is almost impossible for most of us. So I have some suggestions that I think would make our government more transparent and ensure that there is awareness on the Council's part that the residents are paying attention in a way that will allow them to be held more accountable.

1. Provide a mechanism to notify residents when there will be Council and Planning Commission hearings, discussions and actions that relate to topics that each individual resident has the opportunity to flag as being of interest to him or her. This is very easy to accomplish by categorizing issues and providing a questionnaire on the City's website that allows a resident to select what issues are of importance to him / her. Agenda issues could then be flagged using the same categories. Once this is accomplished, automating notifications to residents is simple to accomplish with inexpensive technology that the City already has or could easily obtain

2. The Brown Act requires that City Council meetings be recorded. City staff makes these recordings readily available on request to all residents. The problem is that finding what you are looking for sometimes requires listening to the whole recording. This creates that "I've not the time" issue already discussed. I suggest that the Council agenda be time-stamp indexed to the recordings so that anyone with an interest in any particular topics on the agenda can quickly skip to just those recording portions that they are interested in.

3. To make the Council recordings more accessible they should be posted on the City's web site where they could be retained, along with the time-stamped agendas, for a couple of years. This would make it all so easy for residents to share with friends and neighbors Council discussions that they found to be of interest.

I believe that just implementing these suggestions would improve governance whether they were widely used or not. The simple notion that "the governed might be listening" would improve the quality of the government. Call me naïve (as many have), but I truly subscribe to our founders' notions of democracy.

As an aside, I recently proposed to the RHCA that they record their meetings and make them available, in an indexed fashion, on the Association's web site so that residents who could not attend a particular meeting could hear what was discussed on topic(s) of interest to them.

The RHCA Board refused to consider this. I then asked the Board to make the issue of recordings a part of the just held Annual HOA meeting as a ballot item to allow the membership decide whether the meetings should be recorded. The Board unanimously refused to place the item on the meeting agenda. Hmm.