You’re not alone if you don’t know the answer to that question.
To find out, let’s start start at the County Commissioners’ website. According to the website, the Board of Commissioners is the “…chief policy making body of County government…”[1] The Board’s functions include setting the County budget, reviewing and adopting grants, providing for County activity in regional planning programs, and appointing members of various Boards and Commissions.[2] Here we can also find our current Commissioner. If you live in Hartland (Precincts 1-4) or Tyrone Township, like we do, our Commissioner is Mr. David J. Domas.[3]
Now, do we know how much and on what issues our County Commissioners work? Well, that’s a much harder question to answer. Let’s try and piece together what the County Commissioners did in 2010.
Let’s start by looking for meeting minutes. These minutes record the activities of our Commissioners that we’re looking for: the Commissioners’ discussion relating to resolutions, their recommendations, and final vote tallies. This shouldn’t be too hard – there’s a specific page titled “Full Board Meeting Minutes.” Unfortunately, on this well-titled page, each link leads to an error message.[4] No meeting minutes there.
Now let’s look at the meeting agendas. Here where we find, instead of faulty links, a headache of inconsistency. In some agendas, the recorded minutes for the previous meeting are included with the current agenda and information pertaining to the resolutions. For example, the Board Agenda for 20 September 2010 includes the minutes for the previous Board meeting on 7 September 2010 and minutes for a short meeting on 8 September 2010.[5] The same is true of the Agenda for 7 September 2010.[6] Now take a look at the Agenda for the 23 August 2010 Board meeting.[7] No minutes of the previous meeting. The same is true of 2 August 2010.[8] And 6 July 2010.[9] And in fact, all other Board meetings from 2010.
No online recorded minutes of previous meetings. No easily accessible record of how our elected officials voted on resolutions. No record of their discussion. With the exception of two meetings, taxpayers don’t know what our elected officials did at their Board meetings over the entire course of 2010.
Does this seem like transparent and participatory government? Does this seem appropriate when the Oakland County Board of Commissioners has meeting minutes available online that date back to 1996? Does it seem appropriate when the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners simulcasts their meetings online and maintains an online video archive of meetings dating back to July 2008? Or that the Ingham County Board of Commissioners’ website has meeting minutes organized into separate Board and committee pages?
Well, that’s just twice a month Board meetings, only one part of a County Commissioner’s job. Let’s take a look at committees. Committees normally meet once a month with the exception of Finance which meets twice a month. Here we run into the same issue as with Board meetings: minutes are sporadically included with agendas.
Even more alarming, we realize that the Personnel Committee and East-West Complex Master Plan Committee have no online agendas dating back to January 2008, implying that these committees have not met for over two and a half years. After looking at the calendar, we can see that’s not exactly true. The Personnel Committee met 4 August 2010 at 8am.[10] Why does no online record of this meeting exist, not even an agenda?
From what we can find, let’s take a look at how long these meetings last.
The County Commissioner Board meetings have lasted, for those where records are available online, 55 minutes (9/7/2010) and 32 minutes (8/23/2010). Another issue to note is that all resolutions in both of these meetings passed unanimously. In addition, all Board meetings show a common theme of having zero “Tabled items from previous meetings.”
Here are some of the lengths of the various committee meetings: 10 minutes (General Government, 8/9/2010), 70 minutes (Public Safety, 8/9/2010), 101 minutes (Finance, 8/25/2010), 5 minutes (Infrastructure & Development, 7/26/2010), 25 minutes (Health and Human Services, 7/26/2010), 45 minutes (Health and Human Services, 6/28/2010), and 20 minutes (Infrastructure & Development, 01/04/2010).
This does not include Committee of the Whole meetings, a short meeting that leads into Committee meetings, which lasted 9 minutes (5/10/2010) and 10 minutes (8/9/2010).
So far we have short meetings and missing minutes. Now, do you know how much your Commissioner is paid? Well, that information is just not available on the Commissioners’ website. Perhaps it’s because for this part time work, a handful of meetings a month, the Commissioners are paid $15,000 annually and are enrolled in medical coverage that provides health, dental, and life insurance benefits.
What did we learn? Commissioners don’t want to tell voters what they are doing in meetings, roll through meetings with little debate, and don’t want voters to know how much money they make
Is this what we want in our local government – a group of people that meet for an hour with no political discourse? Why should their time and discussion in meetings – paid for by taxpayers – be unaccounted for? In our current age of technological advance when an iPhone can record political demonstrations and a Twitter account can cover elections in Iran, shouldn’t our County be able to video record government meetings and update its web content?
Healthy, time-intensive debate and the ability to account for various perspectives are fundamental to our democracy. Generations of Presidents believed that our government should be transparent, participatory, and collaborative. We see none of that with the Livingston County Board of Commissioners. It’s time for a new face.
[1] “Commissioners – About.” Livingston County, MI. Web. Accessed 21 September 2010 <http://co.livingston.mi.us/commissioners/about.htm>
[2] Ibid.
[3] “Commissioners – Commissioners.” Livingston County, MI. Web Accessed 21 September 2010 <http://co.livingston.mi.us/commissioners/minutes.asp>
[4] “Commissioners – Minutes.” Livingston County, MI. Web. Accessed 21 September 2010 <http://www.co.livingston.mi.us/commissioners/minutes.asp>
[5] “Commissioners – Agenda 9/20/2010.” Livingston County, MI. Web. Accessed 21 September 2010 <http://www.co.livingston.mi.us/commissioners/pdf2/100920B.pdf>
[6] “Commissioners – Agenda 9/7/10.” Livingston County, MI. Web. Accessed 21 September 2010. <http://www.co.livingston.mi.us/commissioners/pdf2/100907B.pdf>
[7] “Commissioners – Agenda 8/23/2010.” Livingston County, MI. Web. Accessed 21 September 2010. <http://www.co.livingston.mi.us/commissioners/pdf2/100823B.pdf>
[8] “Commissioners – Agenda 8/2/2010.” Livingston County, MI. Web. Accessed 21 September 2010. <http://www.co.livingston.mi.us/commissioners/pdf2/100802.pdf>
[9] “Commissioners – Agenda 7/6/2010.” Livingston County, MI. Web. Accessed 21 September 2010. <http://www.co.livingston.mi.us/commissioners/pdf2/100706.pdf>
[10] “Commissioners – Calendar.” Livingston County, MI. Web. Accessed 21 September 2010. <http://co.livingston.mi.us/calendar/calendar.php?type=month&calendar=55&category=0&month=08&year=2010>
