Orono council looks at record-keeping methods

That question was the main topic of discussion on Monday, Feb. 27 at the Orono City Council meeting.

The topic arose as council member Alisa Benson has questioned the meeting minutes since the start of 2023 where she was sworn in at the first meeting of the year.

Usually, councils approve meeting minutes through the consent agenda, but Benson has asked at several meetings to pull the approval of those minutes from the consent agenda and bring it to the regular agenda to discuss some inaccuracies to those minutes.

Those requests were granted each time, and through the discussion of the minutes, the council had a larger discussion on what they thought the minutes should entail and how much detail they wanted in those minutes from each meeting going forward.

City administrator Adam Edwards told the council that the city currently uses a service to provide minutes for each meeting, and that while the meetings aren’t transcribed word for word, he believes there is significant detail in the meeting minutes.

“We provide more detail than a lot of other cities, including cities that use the exact same service provider we do,” Edwards said. “We, as a city, over the years, seem to err on the side of having a little more detail in our minutes than a lot of our neighboring cities, but have never really gotten over to verbatim.”

Edwards followed by asking the council for direction on if they wanted to keep things as is, reduce the detail in the minutes, or go a verbatim-type minutes.

Most of the council signaled support for what they are currently doing, but Benson asked to have more discussion on the subject and supported more detailed minutes.

“I didn’t feel, in addition to the inaccuracies, I didn’t feel that the flavor at times of the interactions at different times during these meeting notes was being captured accurately in the minutes,” Benson said. “For other cities perhaps, a summative expression in the minutes would be sufficient. I would put forth that other cities perhaps aren’t struggling with some of the issues that this city is in regards to certain subject areas. So this is why I’m interested in capturing an accurate reflection of not just the information, but also flavor of certain exchanges - especially as it relates to public hearing, public comment or debate amongst council.”

The other council members pushed back, saying they video and audio record every meeting and that, along with meeting minutes, allows the public plenty of information if they want to go find it.

“The videotaping of the meetings is complete full transparency,” council member Richard Crosby said. “It doesn’t leave opinions. Somebody can sit there and watch it and get the tenor of the meetings and the conduct of everybody present so it doesn’t leave it up to opinion or how somebody deciphers it. The way the minutes have been are fine. For transparency, the videotaping of the meeting is everything.”

“Everybody appreciates your opinion of the matter but I think you are making the opinion of something that you want - verbatim minutes for a particular agenda that you are projecting on the council through what’s happening in the public and that’s your opinion,” Mayor Dennis Walsh added. “We have different opinions of course.”

It was noted during the discussion that the video and audio equipment in the meeting room will be upgraded in the future with the possibility of adding closed captioning to meetings and a transcribing feature, if possible.

“Video is OK, however that’s really not as useful as having accurate minutes,” Benson said. “I feel deeply committed to having accurate records for the benefit of the public. It concerns me a bit that had it not been for me going through the meeting minutes that seconds or conversations or quotes would be attributed to the wrong individual and we would’ve voted them into the permanent record.”

The council followed by approving the meeting minutes from the Jan. 9, 2023, Jan. 23, 2023 and Feb. 13, 2023 minutes on a 4-1 vote with Benson voting against the motion.

In other city council action, the council approved the reappointment of Brian Roath as Park Commission Chair and the reappointment of Kjersti Duval and Gordon Stofer to the Park Commission.

The city of Orono and Spring Park amended their contract for the city of Orono to provide public works service to Orono to run from January to January to fit into budgeting timelines.