The Dance of the Seven Veils

ORIGINALLY POSTED Thursday, February 22, 2007

The town has a web site. The link is on this page. Everything about the town's goings on that anyone can think of, is on the web.

In 2006, it was re-designed at a cost of $70,000. The monthly maintenance fee is $5000 and the licensing fee is $8000. Staff time for posting is 14 hours a week at an annual cost of $19000. We have barely discovered the many uses to be made of this exciting new communication tool.

We spend between $48 and $52 thousand dollars a year on the Notice Board which appears in the Era Banner weekly. Our staff do all the layout. So there is an additional man hour factor. The circulation is upwards of 70,000 but not all in our area. So the payback is not all benefit.

We put town documents in the library for public viewing. They are at the desk of the Corporate Services department in the Town Hall for anyone needing access. The benefit there is people can ask for help in interpreting the jargon.

People can buy town documents at a cost of production. Depending on the size, the fee can range from a couple of dollars to three hundred dollars.

A couple of weeks ago, council passed a resolution to allow people to sign out documents free of charge for a period of two weeks.

There was no input from staff about how to implement the new plan. Would the documents be loose leaf ? Would they need to be bound? Would there be a penalty if the documents were not returned? Would the cost of the documents be charged if they were not returned? If not, why not? And how would that be accomplished? Would staff have to go out and track down the documents to recover them?

The resolution was strangely silent in that regard although quite verbose in others. It can be read on the Town's web site, in the minutes.

Part of the resolution, directed staff to provide free copies of budget documents to an individual who regularly attends budget meetings. It had been done informally and unofficially, now it is part of official policy to give preferential treatment to one citizen.

Other than the person referred to above, there is no demand from citizens for free copies of town documents. Most taxpayers probably recognize that everything has a cost. If not paid for with a fee from the person who wants it, it will certainly be paid for by a tax on everyone else.

So, readers can see, all kinds of things are happening in the interest of openness and transparency.

I wrote a letter to the editor last week giving a synopsis of events leading to a closed door discussion on Aurora Cable's intention to erect three small wind turbines for a back-up supply of power. I offered no criticism. I set out the sequence of events and allowed readers to form their own conclusions.

That is apparently not the openness and transparency some council members have in mind for the dissemination of public information.