City Needs Top Public Needs In Consultations: BENN
The city produces, post-consultation, a report that is euphemistically called What We Heard. If this report was to be titled in a manner consistent with the truth in advertising laws, it might be What We Chose to Listen To.
The report is basically a selection of feedback from the attendees to the leading and facile questions asked in surveys, or to the one-sided (i.e. far from objective) presentation. From time to time, the report will include a non-supportive comment or two. Controversial items along the lines of “didn’t like the shade of green used to depict the park” or “there wasn’t enough emphasis on my arcane self-serving issue”.
So no, neither staff nor elected officials want independent recordings of their public sessions. They don’t want independent verification of the limited scope of the session. They do not want independent recordings of questions asked but not answered. They do not want independent recordings of the manner in which they have attempted to manipulate the session to show support for a poorly conceived recommendation based on incomplete analysis.
What both staff and councillors want is a scrubbed down report that tells them, and the members of the public who did not attend, that staff did a great job and that the public is supportive of the recommendations. Independent recordings provide evidence that is contrary to this objective.
Cynically yours, with three plus decades of scar tissue to show for the effort.
Ron Benn, a finance executive, has been a member of the Centrepointe Community Association for the better part of three decades.
For You:
Publish Or Be Damned At City Hall
Happy Anniversary, Wendy Stephanson: THE VOTER
Stop Recording A Meeting? Don’t Let Them
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– The Bulldog – News Feed Enter 
My response to The Voter’s article would have said the same thing in a much more terse and less elegant way, but now that the idea has been laid out there the city will do all it can to protect its own self interests.
sisco — good point — k
Ron,
You are, sadly, absolutely correct yet again. I guess I’m still following George Bernard Shaw who said something along the lines of “Some see things as they are and ask why; I dream of things as they never were and ask why not.” It helps keep me somewhat sane* while I continue to interact with the City and other levels of government.
*emphasis on the ‘somewhat’!