Kudos to Mike Wiggins and The Daily Sentinel for reporting Grand Junction’s latest move toward increasing the transparency of city government, “City Council, planners to have meetings streamed,” March 5. Perhaps our county commissioners should take heed.

Traditionally, the Mesa County Commissioners have differentiated between two kinds of public meetings — the regular Monday administrative hearing and the regular Tuesday land-use hearing, on the one hand, and the almost weekly county attorney and county administrator meetings, on the other. The former are broadcast live on Channel 12 and recorded, while the latter are neither broadcast nor recorded.

However, Colorado’s Open Meetings Law makes no such distinction, but defines almost any policy-making meeting attended by at least two county commissioners as a “public meeting” — to be properly noticed and open to public attendance and participation. So far this year, at my suggestion, the commissioners have begun reasonably “noticing” the non-hearing meetings and posting agendas (when possible) on the county Web site. However, typically, only Le Roy Standish of the Sentinel and I actually attend those meetings.

Thus, in the interests of increasing the transparency of county government, our county commissioners might consider following the example of Grand Junction and arrange to both broadcast (or “stream”) and record its less well-attended public meetings. By so doing, they will acquaint the citizenry (and thus the electorate) with the daunting range of issues they must routinely confront — and with the professionalism of the county’s staff.

Of course, by failing to do so, our commissioners will simply confirm the need to expand from three to five county commissioners — since representatives from the rural precincts of the county would likely recognize the need to better serve those in Gateway, Collbran, etc. who cannot regularly attend ˆ but might watch our commissioners‚ public meetings.

Thus, I urge our County Commissioners to consider this nonpartisan “modest proposal”..

BILL HUGENBERG
Grand Junction

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.