During the campaign, one of the items I had made as an issue was making arrangements for televising the meetings of the Ways and Means Committee. The Ways and Means or more commonly known as the finance committee in other forms of legislative government is the primary advisory committee to the Burlington Town Meeting. Let me properly define the importance of the Ways and Mean Committee by entering an excerpt from the town bylaws. The committee “makes written recommendations on all financial articles that involve the appropriation, transfer, expenditure, or raising and borrowing of money. The Ways and Means Committee may make recommendations on any and all questions involving Town affairs.” This committee plays a central role in the business of the people.
During the course of the preparation of an 85 million dollar budget each department through out the town must individually bring their budget before the W+M’s for scrutiny. The process begins with the supervising authority and the department heads meeting with a sub-committee chairman. After agreement is reached the sub-committee presents the results to the entire committee for a final recommendation.
Arrangements in order to televise these proceedings included making the main hearing room at town hall through the cooperation of the town administrator available for the committee. The main hearing room is important because it is outfitted with robotic cameras and has an audio system that enables the public access governmental channel to produce a very high quality image of the meeting with a minimum of production staff. Other arrangements included lining up a volunteer to run the robotic console as well as placement of the meetings on the channel schedule.
The committee currently chooses to meet in a room at the police station that is barely large enough to hold the 15 members and has approximately four seats for any member of the public who might wish to watch the proceedings in person.
Televising of public meetings is not new to Burlington as the Town Meeting, Board of Selectmen, School Committee, Board of Health, Board of Appeals, Planning Board and Conservation Commission have all been placed on the schedule and shown live one by one for the last decade or so. At no time has the public access corporation received any resistance except once. The subject of the Ways and Means committee was brought up over four years ago and has been resisted ever since.
The situation began to come to a head last year when the body that the Ways and Means reports to, Town Meeting, passed a non-binding resolution requesting that the committee be televised. Apparently the committee responded by having thoughtful conversation about it and deciding on their own not to comply but to prepare a “show” of some of the deliberations that they deemed appropriate for the viewing public.
The central problem here is that the committee’s approval is not necessary for the taping of their meeting. They are a publicly posted deliberative body that cannot prevent its public viewing. When apprised of this Wednesday night the committee was shocked and appalled and insulted! I was a tool of the executive boards that wanted to “stifle” the committee. The committee could not “discuss sensitive information” and gain “tidbits” of legal and labor issues if they were on television. This is the opinion of some, despite the fact that like everyone else in town, they can go into executive session to discuss such matters. I was “arrogant” to spring this surprise on them. This despite the fact that it has been an issue for four years and I just campaigned on the subject for 8 weeks.
At this point it appears as though the committee may choose to dig in its heels. The chairman has sought a legal opinion as to whether or not he can prevent filming of the sessions. There have been suggestions of negotiations and study and delay. The answer is no. The simple fact of the matter is that anyone with a camera can tape the proceedings and play them on the public access government channel and it can’t be prevented. The choice for the committee is a high quality production with good quality audio and camera angles or a shoddy single camera, one microphone shoot in an old converted school building.
As a community we are in a period of time that may include some financial distress. For that reason alone we need to have more public awareness of our system, so that if hard decisions do have to be taken we may have helped build public confidence by showing the taxpayer how those decisions were deliberated upon and arrived at
The taxpayers of the community have every right to view those proceedings. By watching the professional and painstaking process that town government volunteers and town management professionals follow in order to construct a municipal budget I believe it is possible to build interest, respect and trust in local government. This is precisely what public access government programming was designed to promote.
