It might be a good time to hear from or about Allan Walker, Republican TC endorsed candidate – information about Allan from another party or himself presenting his views. We will strictly enforce “Candidates’ Rules” given on the right. Many are thirsting for a better candidate. Admin
Newcomer, I’ve been looking into these issues for the past year and a half and I still don’t have a good idea of what goes on in this town. Our government is opaque, our elected officials play their decisions close to the chest and no one seems to be forthcoming with posting unedited hard data in an easy to access location.
We as a town need to hash out the issues and come to a conclusion where we want to spend our limited resources and elect public officials whom we feel are most likely to do that. In order for that to happen two things must exist.
1) There must be an open forum for people to get together and discuss the issues in a candid manner. The Cafe has been serving in that capacity for me and it is probably about as good as we can currently get.
2) Have information about what our leaders think, what they are doing, what they plan to do. This includes full board minutes, budgets, actual spending, communication from our leaders on what they are doing and why. This has been a major problem. Without this information the effectiveness of our open forum, as you have noticed, is greatly diminished.
In order for our democracy to work we need to be informed voters. But what can you do when you feel that you are not being informed? In my opinion this is inexcusable given today’s technology. With people working away from town and long hours it is not reasonable to expect that they are going to be able to run out to all the board meetings. It is, however, reasonable for our elected officials to disseminate that information to us. With current technology you could say that it is almost trivially easy for them to do.
We now have a nice new web site that I still can’t seem to find all the budgets and actuals on. I still don’t know exactly what our first selectman is doing about the salt shed or what other issues she is thinking about because she certainly isn’t making any of that information easy for me to find. We’re not just talking about the selectman, but I want all the boards to be this open and the WA as well. If they want to exist on public funds then they can let the public know in detail how their money is being spent.
So in the next election what will I be thinking about? In a word, transparency. Unfortunately John was the only candidate talking about it and he is not longer in the race for first selectman (BOE instead I now hear). So who of the current batch is going to be more open and indeed encourage an atmosphere of openness in our town government? I don’t know but from the last few years I do have a good idea of who it isn’t.
So you, like me, are having a hard time getting a grasp on the issues even though you are putting in a concerted effort. As far as I’m concerned that gives me an idea of what issue I do have a good handle on, transparency. That’s what I want to see now. Without that, all other issues are just not easily defined, analyzed or decided. Most of what we have is partial information and our biases. Hopefully your neighbors realize their conclusions are mostly non-sequiturs due to nothing more than a lack of information. Let’s at least fix that and see where it leaves us.
Thanks. Bowman
Bowman,
Excellent contribution here. You’ve clearly summarized something that I’ve been struggling to understand and articulate. I’m with you 100% – transparency is key.
Yes Bowman. Well said.
Bowman,
While I do not always agree with you, I always appreciate your well-worded perspective.
I must say that I “do” agree with you on this issue.
I would really like your opinion (and John’s based upon his campaign statement) on something. How do you feel about the BOE spending significant $$$ on legal fees against FOI requests and the re-broadcasting of videos (for public viewing) of BOE meetings? Mr. Blackmar has, also, criticized the videotaping of BOE meetings in this very forum.
Tom Hennick, of the FOI Commission, can (and does) answer questions as to whether something is considered “public information” and therefore must be provided under “FOIA” without the spending of one education dollar.
Why are FOI requests sent to the BOE’s attorneys instead of checking with the FOI Commission? I believe the FOI Commission could likewise answer the “re-broadcasting of BOE meetings” question.
Do you feel that these things reflect the BOE’s promotion of “transparency”? Do you have an opinion you could share?
RC, Since you have the numbers, could you tell me how much the BOE spent on legal fees for FOI issues, video taping, and most importantly the Powers lawsuits. Then I will give you my opinion. Please give me all three.
The point is the “spending” NOT the “amount” John. The questions relate to why the BOE is resorting to spending $$$ on legal fees on the two referenced items and not utilizing the FOI Commission as its primary resource (at no cost).
A portion of the “numbers” can be found at the link below, John (I’m afraid you’ll have to do the math). However, I’m sure that you will see that my stating “significant” is accurate.
http://216.93.241.136/Docs/Legal_Bills_May-July.pdf
Could you, please, show me where I referenced SPED lawsuits? I believe this article is on “transparency” of our government.(?) Are potentially frivolous legal expenditures negated by SPED lawsuits? I don’t see the relevance.
Your prerequisite of my “providing you with the numbers” in order to receive “your opinion” is difficult for me to understand.
Reality Check. My criticism of taping of BOE meetings stems from the selective editing that occured whenever the tapes were put on the coalition/academy web site. When Dan Atwood was chair of the BOE back in the late 90′s (that seems so long ago) we taped a few BOE meetings from start to finish and had the tapes on file with the Supt.’s office. Not once did anyone ever “check out” a tape of a BOE meeting for viewing, so we discontinued the practice of video taping, but did continue to audio tape our meetings. (I think this was on advice of legal counsel.)
Mr. Blackmar,
“Clips” of the BOE meetings are available on the coalition site as is access to the entire video footage for the meetings.
Could you, please, reference the “selective editing” that you are referring to?
So, what exactly is there for you to criticize? The fact that portions of the videos have been “highlighted” in “clips”?
Web use/access was not nearly as prevalent in the “late 90s” as it is today. Nor did you (the BOE at that time) provide easy, free access to the tapes, at that time (as is offered on the coalition site). Citizens had to physically go and request them (“check them out”). It’s difficult for families to find the time to ATTEND meetings, much less find the time (or desire) to go and “check out” videos of the meetings. I believe that free and easy access to the videos is much more appreciated/welcome.
Don’t know if my next idea will benefit this discussion or not, but here goes…In my former town of residence (which was also rural, although not as much as Woodstock) the town obtained free cable access and had a set time slot. During the town’s weekly time slot, they re-broadcast in full and unedited, the weekly town meetings. Has anyone looked into doing this for BOF, BOE, and BOS meetings? If not, it could be an option. In our case, the cable company provided the equipment and the air time at either no cost or at the very least, a nominal charge. It was part of a community service requirement by the FCC, I believe. Maybe Charter has a similar program for communities out this way?
I’ve got news for you “new” folks to the political pig sty that is Woodstock politics. The people are better informed than you think. Now that should scare you just a little bit. They know and often times just don’t care or they go along with it. They know what you have been up to and don’t like it. It doesn’t take CPS much effort to beat you guys, you are the best ally they have. Shooting yourself in the foot is you’re specialty.
RC,
Certainly the BOE is included in that as well. It is just better policy to be open, particularly with the unfortunately hostile politics that happen in town. Their best defense is being as open as possible.
So for video taping, while I understand Mr. Blackmar’s reasoning, I think he has it wrong. Yes people are going to take excerpts from them and show them out of context. So what? This happens all the time on the TV news, papers, etc. Hey I think “The Daily Show� is pretty funny but I don’t have any illusions and know that many of the clips are taken out of context to show their subjects in the most humorous light. Pretty much all organizations disseminating information have an editorial slant, some more pronounced than others.
So the best defense once again is to make videos that are publicly available. If any out of context video clips are generating too much political capitol some concerned citizen is going to look at the full video and find out the context and tell people about it. The key is the videos need to be easily obtainable. Having to go somewhere to check them out isn’t going to work. Finally most videos probably won’t be watched, but a few contentious ones might just get watched a lot.
Now as for the BOE asking council for legal advice; I have no idea on how much time was spent and on what. I do know that our BOE continually asking the opinion of legal council is a necessary cost of having a volunteer citizen BOE as they are not going to be legal experts in government. In fact, even professional civil servants ask advice of legal council from time to time.
Not all information held by government agencies, including our school system, is releasable to the public. Our BOE spending some time with legal council making sure that releasing the information is legal and what their powers are is a good thing. It is comparatively cheap insurance to prevent a lawsuit against the town. Now you could claim that they are spending too much time with legal council but I’ve never seen anything concrete on how much time they are spending on these issues.
While we are on the subject, if the BOE is feeling that there are too many FOI requests coming in and that is costing the taxpayers too much money then they should be tracking how many resources they are expending on them (translate to $$$). Id’ certainly like to know how much all these FOI requests are costing the town, particularly if many of them are for insubstantial cost issues.
If it looks like I have been taking the side of the BOE in most of these discussions it is because I have. Some of the only real hard and verifiable facts I have about them are how much we are spending per pupil and what their test scores rank. We are paying nearly the lowest per pupil cost in the state yet getting good test scores out of them.
So I am left with thinking that we are either getting an excellent deal for our money in an organization that is running very lean or that pretty much every K-8 system in the state of CT is way over funded/wasteful and that the Woodstock BOE is just less over funded and wasteful than most of them. I don’t have enough hard data to come to a final conclusion on which is true but I know which one Occam’s Razor leads me to.
In any organization there is always some level of waste, just no getting around it. However, as an organization gets leaner the there are diminishing returns in trying to ferret it out. In fact there always comes a point when efforts to remove additional waste are actually more expensive than the waste itself. Once again I don’t have any hard figures on where we are in relation to this but it is something I’m continually thinking about.
We have been getting an excellent value for our dollar K-8 in Woodstock. What ever combination of factors that are causing that to happen I don’t want to screw up by a continual series of cost savings witch hunts. Why do I think that way? Because as I’ve stated before I don’t want our students to get the education we are actually paying for. I want them to get the much better education that we are currently getting.
Thanks.
Bowman,
As for the video “clips” being “out of context”, I find this difficult to understand as the “clips” encompass motions and their entire discussions. What is so “out of context” with that? This has been done, I am told, to focus (highlight) particular discussions of imortance as most people are unwilling and/or unable to find the time to sit through 6 hours of video footage. Although, that is provided for them should they choose to do so.
So you did not refer to the link?
http://216.93.241.136/Docs/Legal_Bills_May-July.pdf
If you had done so, you would “have an idea on how much time was spent and on what”. I must say that I am disappointed that you would not choose to “know”, but would rather avoid (or ignore) the information so that you would not have to respond to it. You had given me the impression that you did not operate that way. Obviously, this was a false impression. Again, disappointing.
Nor have you addressed why the BOE can not refer to the FOI Commission when determining what can be released and what can not. That IS its function.
http://www.state.ct.us/foi/
Individuals who are requesting documentation are paying 25cents per page. How “costly” to the BOE could FOI requests be?
I have heard (and read in here) time and again that this BOE is “the most educated BOE that we’ve ever had”. In fact, Lindsey Paul is a Harvard grad and Bill Loftus is an ATTORNEY. The qualifications and/or professions of these two members, alone, does not support your statement of “our BOE continually asking the opinion of legal council is a necessary cost of having a volunteer citizen BOE as they are not going to be legal experts in government”.
The fact is that there are other “hard, verifiable facts” out there and you are deliberately choosing to ignore them. Why would you do that?
Again, you had impressed me with posts that appeared “open-minded”; however, I am now left to the conclusion that your posts were only intended to “appear that way”. I now see that your posts were deliberately “playing devil’s advocate” so that your message could be seen as “subtle” and thereby given more objective “weight”. What a shame.
This coming from Reality Check who is unaware that the Academy tuition is non-negotiable – the very heart of the dispute between BOE and WA.
Talk about a lack of information.
RC,
I’ll try and pick out the meat of your arguments from your ad hominem attacks. You would do better to work on the substance of what I’m saying than falling into fallacious personal attacks. Now on to my response.
The document you linked to doesn’t tell me much, particularly how many FOI requests that it represents which is the key piece of missing information. Even then, the vast majority of the charges have nothing at all to do with FOI requests. Of the entire document I added up about 10 hours of legal council regarding FOI requests. Am I missing something? If you’ve ever dealt with hiring a consultant you’d understand that 10 hours is an extremely small amount of time.
Sure there is a FOI commission that they can use as a tool. But they are not a substitute for our board reasonably using their own legal counsel. From your own documentation you have not shown any pattern of unreasonable spending for legal counsel in relation to FOI requests.
Now you are trying to make some hay out of state requirements of FOI requests being .25/page as if this has some bearing on cost. Government fees rarely have anything to do with the cost of fulfilling them. It sounds suspiciously like the amount a legislator or civil servant thought was a reasonable fee to charge a citizen per page. Unless, of course, you have some information that this fee is unusual in the fact that it is somehow related to the total cost of fulfilling it I don’t see the state fee per page as being particularly significant to this discussion.
As far as Mr. Loftus being an attorney, what point are you trying to make? Now I could get into issues of legal specialization, second opinions, etc. but let me ask you this. If Mr. Loftus is a legal practitioner of law in CT, is knowledgeable about statutory law/case law around FOI requests and already knew the answers to these questions so didn’t feel a need to consult with legal counsel, why did they have to see an attorney in the first place? Just to spend the taxpayers money for the sake of doing so? I fail to see what you are trying to get at here. Now I don’t know what state Mr. Loftus is licensed to practice law in nor what his specialization is but if you think that lawyers don’t regularly consult with other lawyers then you are mistaken.
BTW, you have failed to address why the K-8 costs per student are so low compared to other towns in the state. I have yet to hear a reasonable reply to this question amid continuing accusations of fraud, waste and abuse. If all you have got is 10 hours of legal fees and wondering about a couple of students travelling on a large bus then I’ll have start to wondering if you weren’t just grasping for straws.
Thanks.
Wackity Rant
I’ve got ten bucks saying Reality Check is grasping at straws.
Well I had to go to the wackity rants section to read RCs reply. I won’t go to far on the ad hominem tract as it distracts from the discussion. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if RC has attacked my integrity and weather he continued to do so in his “rant”.
He tried to claim that since Woodstock’s legal council charges $200-250 hours an hour they are not consultants. I’m not getting into a pedantic definition debate, anyone can look up the term.
RC is of the opinion that our board should proceed without the benefit of legal council. I don’t know how it is with government agencies but where I work we constantly check with legal council on a variety of things including releasing public information, no matter what information we get from public agencies. They aren’t the ones who are going to be held responsible if they make a mistake, we are. And yes, our legal department does consult with outside legal council.
So here’s the issue. I mentioned the cost per student with the WPS. How does this tie into the lack of visibility for our government? There are basically three groups competing for funds, the K-8, WA and the balance of town government. All three of these agencies don’t seem to be particularly transparent and we don’t know very much about any of them. At least I don’t.
Now what I do know is that they do have a low cost per student and good testing scores. What I can’t figure out, is when compared to the rest of the groups (like WA that has average cost per student and average testing scores) the WPS is signaled out for scrutiny. When looking at the available figures, ceteris paribus, they just don’t seem to be the logical first target for scrutiny when looking at three opaque groups. That just has never made sense to me and I still have not received an answer from RC or anyone else on that bandwagon on why this is so.
Thanks.
$%^&# typos…
Bowman –
WPS is definitely not a logical target. But other groups are – Town Hall, the Academy, the Fire Department and the Open Space Fund get the money they want with no scrutiny by engaging in, encouraging or allowing others to conduct this systematic campaign against the Woodstock public education system.
In the ten years since Ernie Wetzel, Gus Massiello and Jay Livernois first darkened the door of the Woodstock Board of Education, CPS has created an anti-education juggernaut with a continuing campaign of attacks – every one proven false – against this school system.
I have never heard of anything like this. And for Woodstock Academy, an independent contractor to the public schools, to use their independent status and superior state-mandated funding status to actively engage this political program to undermine these schools is truly breathtaking.
Who are these people?
Just to answer for myself on what Mr. Loftus does I did some searching on Findlaw and found one hit for William P. Loftus III. If this is the same person, and I suspect it is, his specialty is criminal law and he practices law in Massachusetts. If I were him I’d be contacting an attorney licensed to practice law in CT with the correct specialty when dealing with FOI questions on a CT board.
This is the only prudent response for the town. Denying a town board access to legal council is a great example of the phrase, penny wise and pound foolish. Our town boards spending a few thousand dollars in legal fees up front is good insurance against the town paying out hundreds of thousands in legal fees down the line due to a bad action. We’re probably already going to be paying that on the salt shed issue, we don’t need another problem.
Thanks.
9.26 – We have received information indicating Mr. Loftus is engaged in the general practice of law in Massachusetts, but does not ‘specialize’ in criminal law. – Admin
No surprises there, FindLaw listings aren’t always entirely accurate.
Thanks.
Do any of you ever pick up the phone and call the people you are talking about and ask them questions? Or do you sit uninformed and speculate constantly? You all sound extremely silly.