County Executive Bob Tucker isn’t as silly as he seemed when he went through with a Board of Supervisors work session June 11 on whether to make the minutes of Board meetings “summary” instead of “near-verbatim”: He was able to extract $35,000 from supervisors for additional staff to transcribe Board minutes.
The idea of making government less transparent drew widespread criticism from citizen watchdogs. But the Board of Supervisors met 194 times last year, an increase of 43 percent from 2000. Minute transcription is way behind—the most recent minutes available are from January—and staff wondered whether podcasting, which started in 2006, filled the void if the Board went to summary minutes. So supervisors had to choose whether to scrap near-verbatim minutes or to ante up the $35,000.
“I really appreciate staff going through this exercise with us because it gave me a really good idea of what summary and verbatim means,” said Supervisor Sally Thomas. “And I’m strongly on the side of verbatim. Then I had to decide whether it’s just hubris, do I just like being able to pick out what I said, and I convinced myself that had nothing to do with it.”
Only Chairman Ken Boyd voted against it.
Since the minutes of the discussion won’t be available for many moons, you can listen to the full discussion at Charlottesville Tomorrow’s website.