“…secrecy can be accomplished … by making it difficult…for the citizens to gain access to the decision-making process”
Rapoport and Debunker appear to be on the opposite sides of the fence when it comes to openness of the civil proceedings of our Town government. Like many others in Town, I have often wondered how Town initiatives get started – like the initiative to find a new high school to replace Woodstock Academy – and the role of the First Selectman in pursuing new initiatives. Wouldn’t the pursuit of new initiatives begin with the First Selectman and the Board of Selectmen rather than in some Town committee? If a Town committee conceived of a new initiative, wouldn’t pursuit of this new initiative have to receive approval by the Board of Selectmen?
In this context, I have often wondered about the limits of authority of the Board of Selectman, and the role of the First Selectman as defined in the Woodstock bylaws. I have been curious about this because it’s my, perhaps naive, impression that many of the auxiliary Town Boards and Agencies function autonomously without oversight by the Board of Selectmen. Woodstock’s Web site sheds no light on this subject – nor any information on the roles of other paid staff, elected Board members, and committee appointees (see the comments section in “Another Perspective…” by Debunker for more on this subject). It seems to me that we ought to be continuously reminded as to what these roles and limitations are.
To find out if other towns provide this information, I searched Google for information on the “authority� of “Board of Selectmen� and got 147,000 hits even. Since the Board of Selectman is a government organization peculiar to New England, many of the hits were accurately focused on this subject. In fact many of the hits were the official Web sites for New England towns. If I restricted the search further to “Woodstock Connecticut� or “Woodstock CT� I got 4 or 18 mis-hits, respectively, (out of the 147,000) that used the word “authority� in some other context – I did not find the official “Town of Woodstock� Web site in this search result.
When I looked at the second hit in the list of 147,000, it was the official Web site for the Connecticut Town of Durham. I opened this site and found the homepage to be filled with basic information about Durham government. In the center of the Web page there was a statement pointing to the statutes of the Town Charter and General Statutes of the State of Connecticut that define the authority of the Board of Selectmen (BOS). Just below this, there was a paragraph on the “Powers and Duties� of the BOS. The following is a quote of most of this statement:
“Responsible for supervising the affairs of the town and responsible for guiding town officers and town bodies toward accomplishing the objectives of the town’s long-range comprehensive plans. Responsible for presenting to the Board of Finance the amount, purpose and proposed method of financing projected capital expenditures, holding joint meetings at least two times a year with one or more members of all boards, commissions and agencies to coordinate the planning and action of such, reviewing the current and projected administrative and fiscal needs of the town and developing and maintaining a long-range comprehensive financial plan. Responsible for making appointments to applicable town offices…â€?
Below this statement was a list of current members of the BOS and identification of the First Selectman.
At the bottom of the page, there were hot links to the agendas and minutes of the BOS meetings.
If you look to the left there are 18 hot links to different categories of information. One of these links takes you to 14 different “Town Departments and Officials�. All of the Town Hall and committee staff are listed, and there is a way to communicate directly with each town official by email along with all other contact information.
We are only scratching the surface here. I know little about the Town of Durham or the other 10’s of thousands of Towns whose official Town Web sites were found – but I have already learned something about how Durham operates. It became clear to me that many or most Towns in New England feel obligated to reach out to Town citizenry – the opposite arrangement for Woodstock is suggested in the last paragraph of Debunker’s article; Debunker agrees, however, that the Town needs a better Web site. Unfortunately, secrecy can be accomplished simply by making it difficult or awkward for the citizens to gain access to the decision-making process of Town officials.
Quote from Re-News author’s comment: “Take a look at http://www.townofwoodstock.com. There is nothing of real value there – for example, very basic information like a listing of town committee members, consultants, minutes of meetings, and even the names of the current selectman. To get minutes you have to go to City Hall, pay for the copying, and accept the perception that you are invading ‘their’ privacy. If you click on “Town Officesâ€? at the Web site you quickly learn the City Hall Office hours and that’s it – otherwise you end up with a lot of blank pages, I guess, intended for ‘information’. There are no minutes, no listing of staff members and committee/agency appointments, and no description of hired consultants even though the citizens of Woodstock pay for these functions and activities. There is also no way to communicate directly with any leaders of the Town through this Web site – the only way to communicate with them is to attend the meetings and shout very loudly as a handful of citizens did years ago over the mis-management of the schools. This website serves as a testament to the unwillingness of the Town leadership to communicate EFFECTIVELY.”
It’s interesting that the Board of Education has a pretty good section at the Woodstock Publics Schools Web site. If you read the minutes of the December 8th BOE meeting, you will see that certain “guests” were present, one of which was Mrs. Wholean our First Selectman. She was not identified as the First Selectman, but merely identified as a “guest”. Isn’t she an Ad Hoc member of this Board? According to the Durham “Powers and Duties” statement, she may even have a supervisory role to play over the BOE.