Mike Ball educates us on the interesting background of Paul Walkowski, the consultant who wrote an 80-page report on why the council should ask the state Legislature to let it ban the public from its meetings. He also sums up why the entire effort by councilors Flaherty and Feeney to keep the public out of public meetings (sorry: To consider keeping the public out of public meetings) would be so laughable if not a) anti-democratic and b) a continued waste of taxpayer money thanks to repeated court rulings telling the council to knock it off.
More:
Boston City Council: What are they hiding?
Ed. note: On Saturday, I got my paper copy of the report. I was disappointed to see it was not hand-scribed, let alone illustrated with fanciful images of dragons, that, in fact, it was merely a photocopy of a document clearly produced in a word processor - you may recall how the council said it did not have electronic copies available for public distribution yet, so one wonders how truly awful the networking is at City Hall that the council cannot attach Word documents to e-mail messages, let alone post copies on a Web site somewhere.
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Comments
Adam, any chance you could
By 02132
Mon, 09/15/2008 - 11:48am
Adam, any chance you could scan those puppies and get them online for us? You could be our own little WikiLeaks for our local secretive overlords.
The Zak has already done that
By adamg
Mon, 09/15/2008 - 11:53am
Really, right here.
Robert Ambrogi has posted a better looking PDF of the 30 or so pages that deal with the Open Meeting Law - where the author goes to great lengths to try to convince the reader that councilors somehow have their First Amendment rights abridged by having to hold their meetings in public.
Gripe
By fenwayguy
Mon, 09/15/2008 - 7:14pm
The Citizen Media Law Project page is unreadable thanks to a stylesheet error which obscures the left margin. I made sure the problem was not with my browser, then tried to bring the problem to their attention, but their contact form is unusable because part of the captcha image is also obscured. Brilliant.
To quote their very document, "his is not rocket science".
It is?
By eeka
Mon, 09/15/2008 - 7:28pm
Looks fine here.
http://1smootshort.blogspot.com
Weird
By fenwayguy
Mon, 09/15/2008 - 8:52pm
I've displayed the page in IE, Firefox and Opera, and leftmost couple of characters are chopped off in all three browsers. Maybe it's my display. Anyway, not worth distracting from the subject at hand. Thanks for checking it out.
What does the City Messenger do?...
By theszak
Mon, 09/15/2008 - 11:02pm
Boston City Council central staff routinely violate FOI freedom of information public records principles of open government. Council Staff Director A. Braga, J.D. deflected and extorted citizens interested in Council proceedings and transactions by threatening to withhold Council communications, public notices of public meetings. The City Clerks office routinely short shrifts enquiries about the Council Docket and Council Minutes. Council Minutes are too abbreviated to make sense to most people and have numerous unclear references. The Docket Numbers cross index isn't made available. The activities of City Messenger Ron Cobb at the Council should be made clear to the public. E. Fritch Stenographic Associates at the Council gets grandfathered in without the proper widespread bid process. E. Fritch Stenographic Associates uses older software that's out of date and increases costs but has less features than the modern scopist software that puts closed captioning for people with hearing loss on Council cablecasts and webcasts. Modern scopist software makes available drafts of Councilors' remarks and debate in real time. Following Council proceedings and transactions would be easier and people using computers at their branch public libraries or at home could quote Councilors' remarks and debate in sending responses to their favorite Councilors, see also
http://www.scopists.com/Scopistry/
Extracts from the Report to the Council Rules Committeee
By theszak
Mon, 09/15/2008 - 11:05pm
by Paul Walkowski
extracts from the report
http://SunshineBoston.blogspot.com
Incomplete reports. Boston City Council.
By theszak
Tue, 09/16/2008 - 1:21pm
Please send Tabs 1-5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 for the
Report to the President
and Committee on Rules and Administration
August 2008
Addressing the Effect of Judicial Decisions
on the Boston City Council's
Operation and Statutory Independence
Prepared by:
Paul Joseph Walkowski
Special Projects Assistant to the President and
Committee on Rules & Administration
Tabs 1-5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 aren't in the Report
and are listed in the Table of Contents as
> Table of Contents
>
> Letter to the President
> About the Author
> Executive Summary ........................... Page 2
> Overview & History .......................... Page 4
> Form of government & methodology ............ Page 6
> Case Summaries .............................. Page 8
> Effect of Decisions ......................... Page 24
> The importance of the city council's
> internal exemption ...................... Page 26
> A. Generally ............................ Page 27
> B. The Historic basis for exemption...... Page 30
> Remedial Responses .......................... Page 40
> Proposed G.L. Affecting the
> relationship between the executive and
> legislative branches of government ...... Page 41
> Political options ....................... Page 41
> Addressing the Open Meeting Law ......... Page 43
> Open Meeting Law changes necessary ...... Page 64
> Proposed G.L. on Open Meeting Law
> Option 1 ................................ Page 69
> Option 2 ................................ Page 70
> Option 3 ................................ Page 71
> Open Meeting Law ........................ Page 72
> Conclusions ................................. Page 76
> A note about the salary ordinance ....... Page 78
> Case Law .................................... Tabs 1-5
> 1821 Charter ................................ Tabs 6
> 1854 Charter Revisited ...................... Tab 7
> 1885 Charter, Shift of Executive Powers ..... Tab 8
> 1909 Charter, Consolidation of Power ........ Tab 9
> 1948 Plan A Charter Offered ................. Tab 10
> 1951 Charter Revisions, Council Exemption ... Tab 11
> 1910 Finance Commission Report .............. Tab 12
> 1909-1910 List of Incidental Expenses ....... Tab 13
> Presentation of Charter History ............. Tab 14
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