Saturday, December 22, 2007

The board doesn't want you reading their minutes.

For several months, perhaps as many as six months, the ability to search board minutes and agendas has ended. Sure, there is a web page that allows you to insert search terms into a field, but the search doesn't take you anywhere.

Could it be that the District doesn't want anyone searching past minutes to determine how board members have been voting? Could it be that a massive editing campaign has been waged to alter the minutes to reflect a more judicious outcome - albeit false? Could it be that public access to the minutes of meetings would introduce a degree of accountability that would just be intolerable?

Most people don't have the time or energy to attend board meetings. They can be a real snooze fest and really don't amount to much more than a lot of ceremonial back patting that fortunately doesn't come through in the typed minutes. I prefer to skim over the contents of a three hour meeting in a matter of minutes. While I care about where my tax dollars go and how they are frivolously wasted, I don't care to subject myself to the mundane and physically-exhausting contents of an unexciting and uninspired room of misguided public sloths.

Just when will the search function return to the District's official website? Is it a matter of employee qualifications? Perhaps no one on staff knows how to reanimate the search function. If you need help, just drop me an email and I'll send over my webmaster.

Editorial: Is it a coincidence that the search function died shortly after this blog grew legs and started walking around asking questions?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Their server appears to be down this weekend as well.

Anonymous said...

Imagine that! How convenient! someone is definitely watching this Weblog from the District!

Anonymous said...

You'd better watch out, you'd better not cry, you'd better not pout, I'm tellin' you why...St. Nick and his reindeer are watching!!!

Anonymous said...

Sorry to burst your bubble but the search feature has been non-functional since the person who developed that page left the district well over 18 months ago. Since then I have been checking and even asked repeatedly of the two persons who are in charge of the web site when it would be fixed and received back the same kind of vacant stare as would be expected of certain managers if you had asked them the color of the sky.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps they want us to request the minutes via a public records request. That way all kinds of business could pass by unchecked as you wait for them to arrive in the mail.

ESD15.org said...

Yes, I was trying to give the District the benefit of the doubt. My attempts to search their archived materials was sporadic until about six months ago.

I was under the impression those earlier outages were just infrequent glitches.

Thank you.