The frustrating task of acquiring town meeting minutes

Posted

Henry Boitel wasn’t asking for anything complicated. He just wanted to know what’s going on at the Town of Hempstead board meetings when he wasn’t able to attend. “The public doesn’t have any idea of what’s going on at those meetings,” said Boitel, “unless they read something in the newspaper.”

So when Boitel couldn’t make the board meetings, the majority of which are held during the day, he submitted a Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL, request for minutes from those meetings.

And then, Boitel says, the problems with the town’s communications with the public became manifest.

A month after requesting minutes from 14 town meetings, Boitel received 24 compact discs containing audio — much of it inaudible — of the meetings from the town clerk’s office. “A substantial part of those recordings are unintelligible,” he said. “When the supervisor feels that an employee of the town should give a response, and that person stands up and responds, most of the time I can’t hear what they’re saying. Plus, they’re not speaking into a microphone. And the sound system there stinks.”

In addition to the poor audio quality, Boitel paid a dollar for each of the 24 CDs (which have 800 megabytes of space, but no more than 94 megabytes of information was recorded on any one of them). This violated New York state’s Open Meetings Law, which mandates that the cost of a FOIL request be equal to the cost of the medium on which the information is provided. A quick check showed that Staples has blank, recordable CDs available for 21 cents each.

Even more surprising is the cost of town meeting transcripts. According to correspondence received by Boitel from Marie Jerome, a records access officer for the town, transcripts are provided to the public through the town’s outside vendor, North Shore Courts Reporter. The Herald contacted the company’s owner, Chris Marshall, about ordering a transcript of a recent meeting, and was told the fee would be a whopping $5.95 per page. “The meetings are only transcribed upon request,” Marshall explained.

Most FOIL requests ordered by the Herald cost 25 cents per page.

Page 1 / 2