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I thought Mena Kaehler was just musing out loud several weeks ago when she asked the other county commissioners if they should remove all the agendas and minutes of meetings from their web site that were more than five years old. She reasoned that old minutes were stored away at the county building anyway.
It was at that very meeting that commissioners began a discussion that centered on things that had happened back in 2004. And now that information is not easily available to the public.
Not only that, selected meeting agendas and minutes are also missing from more recent meetings — June 1, 2010, for instance.
The internet is supposed to help make government more accessible and transparent, for the governed as well as the governing. Now, members of the public, or even a sitting commissioner, must go to the county and ask to have access to the old records (minutes used to go back to 2002), using up valuable employee time, instead of having that information at the touch of a computer key.
There is no reason the county can’t find the room on its web site for all the information that should be accessible to the public — old records as well as new.
Removing all but the last five years of records and other selected (why?) records is a disservice to all concerned. It only serves to wrap county business in the cloak of darkness of the olden days.
Let’s use the modern technology we have to better our county government, not hide it from the public.
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