Thursday, May 05, 2016

Allow Public Online Access to our Committee Meetings! Now!

Do you think we should have a recorded feed to our Finance and other Lake County Board Committee Meetings? Yes, of course you do because in Lake County Government all the action takes place in Committee and the once a month full board meetings are Boooorrrrrinng! Yesterday at our Finance Committee meeting Sandy Hart of Lake Bluff spoke to the need for transparency and better public access to these meetings. While this issue had be discussed in the past in 2015, it was kind of... tabled at that time. At the begining of the meeting the conversation was cut short because the chairman thought this was a NEW MEMBER INITIATIVE that was outside our normal county function and should be discussed later on in the agenda under budget policies. The fine tuning of our budget policies is the normal beginning process of the yearly budget discussions. Because the State of Illinois has cut several grants and monies to local governments we have to look at ways we can futher restrain our spending and give all the departments and directors a clear message about cost reductions atributed to revenue cuts. On this issue I fully agree and keep pushing on living within our means. Now, the new initative section of the budget policies deals with a proceedure to create a new program whether it comes to our administrator from the staff or the board members. We have all decided that we should not allow those in 2017 because of fiscal restraints mostly attributed from State of Illinois uncertainies and I agree. The issue of giving public online access to our meetings has been pigeon holed in this catagory of New Initiatives by Chairman Lawlor and everybody else on the Committee but yours truley who strongly objected to this process.Being put into new intiatives would effectively kill online meeting access until 2018. To record meetings would take about 90k in capital unbudgeted money we already have in our telecommunications account. Communications is not a new program. Maybe for the communication crew to go out and tape an event might now require them to go through a new membership initiative process! Our Chairman has taped his Dirty Jobs Show for 3 years now at a cost of $$$$$ and it did not have to go through this process. We have had crews come to our district to tape us and it has not gone through new member initiatives! Come on Now. I thinking that maybe the "New Member Initiatives" is just a another way of making something hard to get done that the BIGWIGS just dont want to do... RIGHT?