The information made available to the public from all Jersey Village City Council meetings and other meetings conducted by the Jersey Village Government including; Mayor, Council Members, or City Manager must be truly transparent. This includes all comments made in public during a period for citizen comments or during a question/answer session. Any effort to select which comments to include, exclude or edit should be considered an effort to avoid transparency of the events and discussions.
One of the duties entrusted to the City Secretary is the reporting of the minutes from meetings including but not limited to City Council Meetings and any Special Called Meetings for other purposes. One of the duties of the Mayor and Council Members is the approval of those minutes and the expectation that they are indeed correct and complete. The accuracy of that process has legal ramifications.
Jersey Village residents that make the effort to attend meetings and request to speak on one or more issues, do so with the expectation that they will be listened to. Another expectation is that there will be a record of their comments including; what they spoke about and the content of their message. The City Secretary should not be the Editor in Chief that determines which speaker gets recorded or the right to edit what the person actually said during their 5 minutes.
The practice of the Jersey Village City Secretary selecting which comments to record and what comments to include in those minutes is a bad practice designed to not have any negative comments or concerns recorded in the public record. Whether this is an issue that rises to the legal level is important, but putting that aside for the moment, that certainly is not transparency. This issue has been addressed with the City Secretary and her response was that she could and would continue to report only what she feels should be reported. When those minutes are approved with the selective editing included, does that provide a true record of the meeting?
Part of the effort of the Jersey Village City Council in recent years was to be more Transparent. One of the ways of accomplishing that was to “live-stream” meetings and to post the recordings on the city website. Lately, some meetings have not been available via “live-streaming” and were not posted on the website. The answer provided to residents that asked about the recordings was that there were technical issues and the recordings were not available. When asked by more residents, it was then disclosed that there was an audio-only recording but that would not be posted to the website. More than a few of the work sessions are treated in this manner.
It is a simple fact that employees will try their best to do their job as they understand their superiors want it done. Elected officials and government managers are reportable to the voters. Another posting on this website points out the characteristics of good governance and it should be reviewed as a reminder of what everyone should expect out of a government, both large and small.