A county half the size of Lowndes has all its Commission
meeting documents online.
Why doesn’t Lowndes?
Is there something the Lowndes County Commission doesn’t want
us to know?
If not, why are they hiding the people’s business from the people?
Contract change orders,
library board bylaws,
applications to volunteer for boards,
board responsibilities,
CPA agreement letters,
invoices
with
itemized expenses,
zoning amendment applications,
deeds,
plats,
cell phone tower applications with maps,
and that
solar farm application:
the Effingham County Commission has
all this and more in its
meeting documents online along with its agendas and minutes.
The format is kind of clunky: one big PDF for all the meeting documents.
But it’s also easy for any competent County Clerk to assemble and post.
That way local citizens can get all this information without having
to guess what they need to find out, file an open records request,
wait at least three days (or years), see what excuse the county came up with
for not answering or try to deduce what was left out, etc.
With meeting documents online, you can just go to the web and look. In Effingham County, with half the population of Lowndes County:
It seems a safe assumption that Lowndes County, with twice the population and presumably twice the resources of Effingham County could post its meeting documents. Why doesn’t it? To quote a VDT editorial of 3 March 2012:
When officials act like they have something to hide, they often do….
What is Lowndes County trying to hide?
-jsq
Short Link:
Amen ! In these days of easy online presence, the dark ages of hidden documents (for which one then has to pay if one wants a printed copy) should be behind us.
Hey John, thanks for this. Some of these links we haven’t even utilized. I will share this with the few other computer users on our Dem Committee. At the Commission meeting last night, they are talking about videoing the meetings to post online as well.