Terry Racine: Terry – As I have spent much time pondering your question about how it harms the taxpayers when we demand outside influence into our problems, I decided to spend time today beginning the audit of the meeting minutes and agendas being published by the municipal bodies here in Midlothian. While I still feel quite stranded in sharing with you (and everyone else) a short and condensed version of what exactly has been going on long before any member of this board took office, I will remain hopeful this short demonstration will give you insight into why I made my own choices on staying fairly silent all of these years regarding this particular topic and how pursuit of justice over this particular topic immediately harms only the taxpayers…while putting paychecks into people’s pockets to correct the issues. First, let me start with what specifically I set out to audit. My intention was to visit all sites and to download all available meeting minutes and agendas available. My next intent was to audit the document library itself to see if there were any gaps in the libraries. Lastly, I had decided to gather a simplistic spreadsheet tracking start times, end times and attendance records. I had no set amount of time I was prepared to complete these tasks, rather it was more important to me to simply achieve the goals I had set upon myself. It took me less than 10 minutes total to download all of the documents on the Midlothian Park District, Midlothian Public Library, Midlothian School District 143 and Bremen School District 228 combined. This was a reasonable amount of time as I was using an extension for Mozilla Firefox to bulk download all available documents on a single web page. Being able to bulk download this set of documents is critical to those seeking to run for office as they cannot formulate a fact-based platform to run on without the information contained in these documents, but having this ability is not an exclusive need of potential candidates. I should have expected the Village of Midlothian collection would be my biggest time consumer…and it was. It took me almost an hour to manually download each and every file and if I had not used the Firefox extension, I would have run into file naming issues with each download. Reason number whatever as to why CivicPlus sold us a piece of garbage (if they are supposed to be specialists in developing government sites, they should know better than to obstruct the document using click-through inflationary tactics). Once I downloaded the documents, I proceeded to open each and every document to extract the data I mentioned earlier, along with a few minor notes along the way. Following is a condensed version of my results, absent of attendance records: 1st column = Digital File Name 2nd column = Document Type | M = Minutes | A = Agenda 3rd column = Governing Body | BOT = Board of Trustees 4th column = Type of Meeting | R = Regular Meeting | S = Special Meeting | PH = Public Hearing 5th column = Date of meeting 6th column = Location | VH = Village Hall 7th column = Start Time 239 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Dec 11, 2013 | none | none 243 | M | BOT | S | Wed, Dec 18, 2013 | none | none 246 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Jan 08, 2014 | none | none 254 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Jan 22, 2014 | none | none 262 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Feb 26, 2014 | none | none 273 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Mar 26, 2014 | none | none 274 | M | BOT | S | Wed, Mar 19, 2014 | none | 7:00 PM 275 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Mar 12, 2014 | none | none 278 | M | BOT | S | Thur, Apr 03, 2014 | none | 7:00 PM 279 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Apr 09, 2014 | none | 7:30 PM 285 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Apr 23, 2014 | none | 7:30 PM 291 | M | BOT | R | Wed, May 28, 2014 | none | 7:30 PM 296 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Jun 11, 2014 | none | 7:30 PM 300 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Jun 25, 2014 | none | 7:30 PM 305 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Jul 09, 2014 | none | 7:30 PM 309 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Aug 13, 2014 | none | 7:00 PM 324 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Sep 10, 2014 | none | none 327 | M | BOT | R | Wed, Oct 08, 2014 | none | 8:02 PM 251 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Feb 12, 2014 | none | none 256 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Feb 26, 2014 | none | none 261 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Mar 12, 2014 | none | none 264 | A | BOT | S | Sat, Mar 15, 2014 | none | 9:00 AM 266 | A | BOT | S | Wed, Mar 19, 2014 | none | none 267 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Mar 26, 2014 | none | none 269 | A | BOT | S | Thur, Apr 03, 2014 | none | none 270 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Apr 09, 2014 | none | none 276 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Apr 23, 2014 | none | none 281 | A | BOT | R | Wed, May 14, 2014 | none | none 287 | A | BOT | R | Wed, May 28, 2014 | none | none 288 | A | BOT | S | Wed, Jun 04, 2014 | none | none 289 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Jun 11, 2014 | none | none 294 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Jun 25, 2014 | none | none 298 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Jul 09, 2014 | none | none 303 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Aug 13, 2014 | none | none 308 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Sep 10, 2014 | none | none 315 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Oct 08, 2014 | none | none 321 | A | BOT | PH | Wed, Oct 08, 2014 | none | 7:00 PM 322 | A | BOT | PH | Wed, Oct 22, 2014 | none | 7:00 PM 325 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Nov 12, 2014 | none | 7:00 PM 331 | A | BOT | PH | Mon, Dec 08, 2014 | VH | 7:30 PM 333 | A | BOT | R | Wed, Dec 10, 2014 | VH | 7:00 PM Overall, it took me somewhere around 3 hours to get to this point in the audit. If you will remain patient with me for but a little while longer… First, the naming of files. It appears that the documents are named incrementally by single digits based on the date of the upload. A couple of problems with this: 1. Anyone downloading the documents will have not a clue what the document is based on the name of the file. This means in order to check which document is which, each one has to be manually opened. 2. The gaps in the numeric system makes it impossible to check at a glance if there are any missing meeting minutes and agendas. 3. Not even the best of programmers can build an app providing these documents the moment they are posted without manual inclusion as the file naming pattern has zero consistency to anchor to. As example, file number 283 is a Proclamation regarding emergency medical services, file 292 is an agenda for Thunder Over Midlothian, file number 304 is an agenda for the Police Pension Fund, file number 317 is the 2013 Financial Statement and file number 318 is the Annual Employee Compensation Report for 2014-2015. As there is no way to predict when these types of documents are released to the website, there is no way to construct an algorithm to catch the instant meeting minutes and agendas are published on the site. Next, the minutes and agendas themselves. It is imperative for all of us to be able to return to an agenda to be able to match up whether or not the agendas were followed (especially after a meeting!). This is an issue that Illinois laws fail the citizen miserably as the laws allow for agendas to be removed from websites in a short amount of time rather than demanding these documents stay accessible for at least a year. Considering the issues that arose surrounding the Tax Levy Hearing last week, including the posting of agendas, this literal permission for municipalities to remove such evidence is shameful and clearly not in the best interest of the State or the citizens. I’ll skip over the column identifying which body was responsible for the minutes and agendas I audited other than the fact that it took me those few hours just to audit the board minutes and agendas without any effort towards reviewing the committee minutes and agendas. Now, if you glance at the dates of the documents I downloaded, you will notice one agenda claims there was a meeting on Saturday, 1 on a Monday and 2 on a Thursday. These variations from Wednesday night cannot be simply explained away as being representative of a special meeting being held as you can clearly see that other special meetings were held on Wednesday nights. While many of feel quite strongly about the reduction in regular meetings in terms of being able to voice our opinions in a more timely and responsive manner, more importantly it allows the board to literally surprise the public with 24/48 hour notice that a meeting is going to be held, forcing the public to re-arrange their schedules should they wish to be in attendance at such special meetings. Again, I would point you back to the past few weeks and the concerns about the mandatory publication of such notices in a “local” newspaper. With the Messenger not being available online, this forces residents to get their hands on the paper and depending on where you go to pick one up, either it is free or you are charged the fee on the front page. However, if you will recall, Mayor Rybak claimed that publication of a notice in the Messenger was not an option due to deadlines and that she was “forced” to turn to a different newspaper to fulfill the mandate. As some/many have come to rely on the Messenger for such types of notices, the absence of a notice in the Messenger left quite a few people in the dark...other than comments published to social media. In addition, there are no minutes for February 12 or May 14 on the site, which leaves all of us to wonder exactly what happened at those two meetings and if there was intent to leave these two documents out of the collection. Next, location, location, location. Agendas are public notices and lack of notice as to the location of meetings is a HUGE problem! Using the Thunder of Midlothian agenda as example, this agenda states that the meeting will be held at Raday Lodge. If they had not cited this, would anyone have thought to head on over to the Lodge for the meeting? It should be noted that the December 8 and December 10 agendas both cite the location of the meeting, of which I hope is the beginning of a permanent habit. Meeting minutes are supposed to be official records of a meeting and to not state the location of where a meeting is held is not in compliance with the intent of the Open Meetings Act in which facts are supposed to be articulated. Last, the start time of a meeting is just as critical as the location and in some ways, is even more crucial. Once glance at the start time column shows almost 50% of our minutes having no start time and well over 60% of our agendas have no start time. Now that I have bored you to tears with what I consider a summary of my discoveries (I have a page of notes I have not included here), if you will bear with me but a moment longer. Municipalities are not permitted to “hide” meetings from the public and my results do not display some sort of sudden shift in policy and procedure. This has been going on in some shape or form since at least the late 1990’s. And I have little tolerance when my Government just shrugs and says whoops while writing out tickets for unmowed lawns and other issues we have zero ability to say whoops and then receive the same leniency. The taxpayers bear the burden of any investigation by a government agency, such as the Public Access Counselors office or even the State’s Attorney’s office. This begins a drawing from two separate taxpayer coffers, i.e. the State and Midlothian. As you can see from this quick audit, there is enough questionable data provided by the Village to warrant more than just an hour or two of exploration by both sides just to try to find out what the actual start times were of 8 meetings. And if my FOIA request for Mayor’s Rybak’s October 22nd speech is any indication of just how honest the current Clerk and Mayor are prepared to be when it comes to providing fact versus fiction in a responsive manner, then I wouldn’t trust the Village to act expeditiously at all…they haven’t earned it. But then again, I have flawed FOIA responses from every Clerk that has held the office and under the watch of two other Mayor’s as well as each lawyer that has been on the Village payroll as Village Attorney. Therefore, if we were to have the PAC office investigate even one potential violation, the bill doesn’t fall on the Clerk (who by local law can extract additional fees from the Village for producing certified copies of a document), it falls on us. In addition, while the taxpayers have to shoulder the financial and credibility burdens that comes with calling for investigations and even prosecution of even one case, it is the Village Lawyer that walks away with billable hours that should not ever be available to them…except in extraordinary circumstances…and even when the Village loses these types of cases, it is the Village Lawyer that stands to make the most profit off of any issue we, as citizens, wish to hold the Village accountable for. So while a part of me wants to apologize for the length of this particular entry, I also cannot in good conscience say that I am sorry for composing this particular entry in its entirely and publishing it here to this forum. Why? Because I know for a fact that all three administrations were on the receiving end of far more extensive compositions demanding immediate corrective actions to be taken, especially in connection with our municipal code book and you can see where that has gotten us. Nowhere except backwards. But it certainly attracted retaliatory actions and intimidation tactics to be deployed on me. Ticket writing was/is a favorite move, but even threats of felony charges have been issued in the past, along with other threats as well. That is why I decided to state publicly my intent to put the Village on probation and to advise them that I would no longer be holding back each and every time I find a problem with our minutes and agendas and there are at least a few who have at least an idea to what extent I am capable of carrying this topic…in any forum, including a courtroom. Now while I cannot stop anyone from reaching out to any entity (government or private), I can certainly ask for patience from the citizens of Midlothian and request that we adopt a wait and see approach at least to this particular topic. While it is rough to have a Trustee table a set of minutes because of errors (and quite frankly, the Clerk should be submitting picture perfect documents to them to begin with), at least we have video showing such an effort, which is something quite new to all of us here in Midlothian. I want to see if they are willing to continue…or if this was a one-hit wonder. Change is never easy or simple no matter what kind of change is being called for or from whom. Those who have accepted jobs as Government are just as human as the rest of us…no matter how much we want to believe something to the contrary. More importantly, those who comprise our local government bodies are also our neighbors and in some cases, even life-long friends. Are we really to a point where there is simply no hope of change of any positive measure, or is Midlothian beginning to live up to the expectations set forth upon all of us by the Founding Fathers…and all those who followed? I believe there is reason to hope, which is why I decided to quit auditing the minutes this particular Sunday. I am hoping this is a short enough explanation on how the taxpayers pockets are poised to be further abused if we call for outside interference…at least for now…? I am not the mood for our temporary Village Attorney to have even one sliver of a chance to make a profit off of a mess that quite frankly, he should have been advising the Clerk to avoid at all costs to begin with.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 12:04:17 +0000
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