The news business doesn’t celebrate “Sunshine Week” until March, but we’ve had so many snow threads, and this is a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for awhile.
It’s been a busy past year at the Zoning Board of Appeals, with 40B hearings on Court Street, Wells Ave, Rowe Street, and Goddard Street. But unlike the Aldermanic Committees, whose Reports and audios are usually put up on the city website in a fairly timely manner by City Clerk David Olson, information on what happens at non-Aldermanic boards and commissions is harder to come by. And whether by design, or lack of caring by anyone with the power to do something about it, the ZBA seems particularly opaque, which is troubling considering the interest in development-related issues and 40Bs.
Above is what the ZBA page for 2014 hearings looks like today. The underlined blue items are clickable; all the others have no information accessible online. So only four of 11 agendas are viewable, and only the January 2014 audio and decision are uploaded. No actual minutes are ever uploaded, although presumably some must be kept. This dearth of information prompted me to buy an extra audio recorder to lend to people going to ZBA hearings in order to know what happened; as a result, there are now more recent ZBA audios on the Newton Villages Alliance yourlisten.com page than on the ZBA page. But should do-it-yourself really be necessary to achieve transparency in government?
And to add insult to injury (or maybe it’s the other way around), if you’re a regular person who wants to get an audio of a ZBA hearing, the fee is $15! Two people I know went separately to obtain audio of a Wells Ave 40B hearing that we didn’t manage to record, and were each charged this amount for a CD. This seems rather steep for public information that should and could be readily available on the city website, and if not intended to discourage people from being informed, it could certainly have that effect. By contrast, if someone wants a CD of an Aldermanic committee audio, David Olson tells me they don’t charge if it’s only one. I’m not sure if that’s one per visit, one per lifetime or something in between, but for these audios there is also the option to download the mp3 from the city website.
The Newton Historical Commission, the other development-related commission with actual power (to impose demolition delays), now has all its 2014 agendas, and almost all of its 2014 minutes posted. The Planning & Development Board is great at posting agendas and packets, but not minutes, and the Newton Housing Partnership is not much better than the ZBA at posting anything. As far as I can tell, these two boards are advisory — but they should still at least be posting minutes. And all of these committees could be uploading audios. As that voice used to say at the beginning of The Six Million Dollar Man, “we have the technology.”
Does anyone know why the Decisions are not clickable? Is it an error? All of it certainly should be.
@Marti – they are clickable on the original page. The above is just a screen shot.
Mgwa, no they are not, unless you found a different way. I went to the page before I posted. It is just as it’s looks here, the underlined ones are the only ones. It would show up differently even in the screen shot. There should also be minutes.
@marti – I thought you were talking about the underlined ones, because the text above makes it clear that the rest are missing – that’s the point of the post.
mgwa, I know what the post is about. I was responding to the subject of the article which included the part about only the underlined Desions being clickable.
If you would reread my post, I was asking if it could have been an error when it was put on the site like that. If anyone knew. And then was agreeing with Julia that they all should be clickable regardless of the reason.
I have no idea why you continue to try to correct me. Or why you would think I would wonder why items on a screen shot were not clickable. Of course they wouldn’t.
I apologize for misunderstanding you.
@Marti, based on looking at 2013 and 2015, it looks to me like the page gets set up, with columns for dates and placeholder text for agenda, audio and decision, and then when a meeting happens the dates of the meeting and the notification get added, and then sometime about a year after the meeting, the agenda, audio and decision get uploaded and the links to that info replace the placeholder text. Why it takes so long is baffling.
If you go to the bi-weekly Aldermanic docket, it lists ZBA decisions up top. It’s not minutes, but it is notification. You will also get notice of any appeals decisions above ZBA. For example, see the Jan. 20th docket: http://www.newtonma.gov/civicax/filebank/documents/63603/01-20-15Docket.pdf
Under the Open Meeting law, the official records of any meeting of a public body include the minutes, and documents and other exhibits, such as photographs, recordings or maps, used by the body at an open or executive session. Public bodies are not required to post them on the city website, nor are they required to record or post audio recordings of meetings. Minutes, whether in draft or approved form, must be provided upon request within 10 days, free of charge. All other public records are available upon request under the Public Records law, for which a fee may be required to cover costs.
All that said, I have been doing some legal work in the City of Worcester recently and I am impressed with how accessible their meeting agendas, minutes, reports and audio/video recordings (where available) are. Check it out.
Ted, good to know.
@Ted
Check out http://lucene.apache.org/solr/features.html
It’s been around for a long time.
Maybe you could go and talk to Newtons IT team and see if they could use it – it would make it so much easier to find information!
Wow, Worcester’s streaming video looks great. And they even have ‘share’ buttons! Wonder if their streaming partner Earth Channel Communications is the local public access or what? Just watched a little of their Feb 12 Historical Commission meeting, where first item about a porch was withdrawn because another porch had collapsed due to snow, so applicant wanted to resubmit with both porches. Talk about current!
We tried a few years ago to do live streaming and expand video coverage of aldermanic and other board meetings with NewTV but there were various technical and other issues that got in the way.
The meeting room in Worcester City Hall where the video recordings are made is specifically set up for these meetings, and the city provides ASL interpreters free of charge (one of my clients is deaf) for meetings. Proper lighting and sound systems are key. We just don’t have the technology at Newton City Hall, although the digital records we use in committee meetings are pretty good.
I hope the Board of Aldermen vote against reappointing the horrible, disgraceful, nasty, spiteful, Brooke Lipsitt to another term on the ZBA. Ms. Lipsitt’s left-wing agenda of more 40B housing projects result in more wasteful government spending, more burdensome taxes and more reckless government borrowing and those are but a few reasons why the aldermen should vote against reappointing her.
We need a Zoning Board of Appeals that puts the interests of Newton and its residents ahead of politically wired developers.
As the chairperson of the ZBA, Lipsitt has:
consistently privileged developers over residents, allowing developers and their attorneys to speak first, as long as they like, and as often as they like throughout the proceedings at public hearings, even though she has the authority to allocate speaking time more equitably between supporters and opponents of a project;
controlled when, how long, and what topics residents were allowed to address in their comments, interrupted, scolded and used a gavel to intimidate some into silence, and failed to ask follow up questions of opponents to explore the details of their concerns;
made residents wait so late into the evening before being allowed to speak that many with children at home or work to go to the next morning had no choice but to leave without ever being heard;
joked that she would allow the Board to listen to only as many public comments “as we can stand”;
presided over ZBA hearings in an arbitrary and capricious manner;
inappropriately asked the members of the public in the audience to raise their hands to indicate whether they supported or opposed proposed 40B projects;
repeatedly asked her colleagues to participate in straw votes, enabling her to continue a hearing whenever a straw vote revealed there weren’t yet enough votes to approve a 40B permit, and thus keep the hearing open until enough votes for a 40B permit could be negotiated;
refused to recognize a distinguished former State Representative, acting as pro bono attorney on behalf of residents, while this elderly gentleman had his hand raised for recognition for more than 30 minutes;
ignored Planning Department recommendations and unilaterally cut inflow and infiltration rates and mitigation payments developers would have to pay for project impacts, potentially costing the City hundreds of thousands of dollars on proposed 40B projects;
insisted that the Court Street 40B proposal could not be reduced in size, ignoring her ZBA colleagues’ requests to reduce the project’s size;
refused her ZBA colleagues’ calls for an independent financial review of the Court Street developer’s claims that reducing the project’s size would make the project “uneconomic”;
stated that the low-income residents displaced by the Court Street 40B project were not the concern of the ZBA;
waited until close to midnight and an almost empty chamber to push her exhausted colleagues for the 3-2 vote to award a 40B permit to the Court Street developer;
exposed the City to costly legal action because of her actions leading to the Court Street decision;
refused to allow residents to mention the 1.5% land area standard or ask questions about it in relation to the Rowe Street 40B proposal at the December 4, 2014 ZBA hearing;
stated on February 12, 2014, incorrectly, that the Open Meeting Law’s notification procedures didn’t apply to an executive session she had called, again exposing the City to potential legal action.
Please judge for yourself. You can hear Brooke Lipsett here presiding over the full-length ZBA hearings on 40B proposals in Newton:
http://newtonvillagesalliance.us8.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=79a35ffa08e543c495bd24144&id=f06c31b29d&e=989d3cb5cb