Riverside Info Tag: Open Meetings Act

Riverside Info Tag: Open Meetings Act http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/ Discussion Forum for Riverside Illinois en Sat, 11 Feb 2012 21:05:23 +0000 admin on "Deleted "Open Meeting Violations" topic" http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic/deleted-open-meeting-violations-topic#post-10857 Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:45:45 +0000 admin 10857@http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/ Sorry - if you have a question about the way the RCA board members are making their decisions, and accusing them of Open Meetings Act violations, take it up with them, not here. spatny on "Reconciliation and progress" http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic/reconciliation-and-progress/page/10#post-9907 Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:33:52 +0000 spatny 9907@http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/ I had to leave early to fetch my frau, but it was clearly and interesting exercise. There is something nice about voting on a question with your little "sender" and seeing your vote, and those of others, tally. These things are quite sophisticated and if you make a mistake or change your mind they only record the last vote from your device. I couldn't help thinking what it would be like to see this type of response in action at a Board meeting. The idea that the six county area will have an additional 2.8 million people here by 2040 is quite daunting. With manufacturing fast disappearing one has to wonder what all these people will do for gainful employment - deliver pizzas and sell each other insurance? With mileage increasing and presumably less use of fuel somewhere down the road (pardon the pun) there will have to be new ways to raise revenues for the road building and public transportation and inner suburb rehabilitation that people seem to want. With an aging population requiring more services, health and otherwise, and fewer people working at good jobs to pay for them, what happens. I think I may be part of the last generation that will not be hunted down by the younger ones who will be saddled to pay for them. We've messed with nature's life cycle and now we will have to straighten it out before it strangles us. And of course, this is worse in most places in the world. The BBC has been doing a comparative study of populations in developed countries and it seems that without immigration of young, lower end workers from other areas, Europe is on the brink of disaster. Probably, if one looks at the facts, there are simply too many people on earth, consuming and wasting too much, to be sustainable. This sounds like anathema nowto those unaffected, but wait twenty years and see what the next generation in power thinks. There are big changes coming... more than just Chinese automobiles on Lake Shore Drive. (What's a Geely, you ask.) You'll find out in about three years. chrisrobling on "Reconciliation and progress" http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic/reconciliation-and-progress/page/10#post-9905 Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:25:46 +0000 chrisrobling 9905@http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/ Fascinating session last night. I urge all who are interested in planning to visit the CMAP website. It has several levels of aggregation about the regional plan, as well as listings of other sessions like last night, should you wish to participate. Regarding the regional 2040 plan, CMAP is seeking both individual and "group" input. Individual input takes place via the web and several kiosks that are moving around the region (don't wait for a kiosk, head for the web). The group input is an aggregation of the sessions like last night, in which groups come together, are led through the process by a facilitator, and make about eight or ten choices about public goods and, in one case, a private market. Those stated preferences are then portrayed to the session participants at the conclusion of their session. The same results are rolled up into CMAP's big magilla -- its regional preference database. They are out doing sessions like last night, which take at least two staffers but are helped by having three or more depending on size, to build the number of entries in the big database. Obviously, since the sessions are open to all, this element of their activity is grounded in the law of large numbers more than inferential statistics. They are probably doing a big survey with a statistically significant random sample (one would hope, an "oversample") as a validation, though I am not sure about that. As regards Riverside, the new technology for real-time preference presentation, in which participants are given a clicker to reply to multiple choice questions, is quite clearly applicable. I was delighted to see a Trustee there personally experiencing the method. He was enthusiastic. I think this approach to building a visual preference vocabulary for the town is the key to identifying areas of agreement and common purpose, around which we can build our responses to planning issues. If you missed it, you may want to go to another session. They are happening all over, so I am sure one will take place in Brookfield or LaGrange. chrisrobling on "Reconciliation and progress" http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic/reconciliation-and-progress/page/9#post-9903 Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:41:07 +0000 chrisrobling 9903@http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/ Dear all, The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning event tonight is a great example of how planning may be done at a regional scale. It uses new technology to great effect, which creates a dynamic representation of participant preferences regarding a variety of key factors. <a href="http://www.goto2040.org/getinvolved/inventworkshops/" rel="nofollow">http://www.goto2040.org/getinvolved/inventworkshops/</a> If you can make it to the website and register, or just come by tonight, you will have an experience that may convince you that planning can be very informative and helpful -- indeed a means of identifying agreement areas, as opposed to isolation zones. chrisrobling on "Reconciliation and progress" http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic/reconciliation-and-progress/page/9#post-9288 Thu, 07 May 2009 11:42:00 +0000 chrisrobling 9288@http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/ Please see "<a href="http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic/village-manager-position-posted#post-9287">Village Manager position posted</a>," another thread on this site, to find a concrete step everyone can take to help us move forward together: recruit solid candidates to be our next Village Manager! chrisrobling on "Reconciliation and progress" http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic/reconciliation-and-progress/page/9#post-9183 Sat, 02 May 2009 10:06:52 +0000 chrisrobling 9183@http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/ Thanks, Tom. Will do. TomJacobs on "Reconciliation and progress" http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic/reconciliation-and-progress/page/9#post-9181 Fri, 01 May 2009 22:57:35 +0000 TomJacobs 9181@http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/ Chris: Your post about Agency Capture is the best thing that I have read on this blog in a long time. In my opinion, you hit the nail on the head with regard to one of the key challenges of any government, the relationship between leadership/decisionmakers and staff/implementation. Eisenhower once said that "the true purpose of education is to prepare young men and women for effective citizenship in a free form of government.” EFFECTIVE CITIZENSHIP! Bingo. Please keep your ideas about improved communications between governments and residents coming. chrisrobling on "Reconciliation and progress" http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic/reconciliation-and-progress/page/9#post-9176 Fri, 01 May 2009 16:44:17 +0000 chrisrobling 9176@http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/ Thank you, Fred. A) I am all for public comment, and even for more ways to provide it. More on that back up the thread. I do not propose limits, I propose expansion using technology. B) You may note I say, "like all such agencies everywhere" (graph 15). Oliver Williamson of Berkeley, under whom I once was privileged to study, has published extensively on bureaucracy and capture. There is voluminous literature on organizational behavior as well. I cite these to emphasize I have no particular complaint with any of our local staff chiefs. Rather, the organizational behavior I mention (a "sub-goal pursuit" in the lingo) happens pretty much as night follows day -- everywhere. So, even with Ms. Rush and Mr. Baldermann departing, for instance, their replacements will be subject to the same imperatives, against which we have our officials and our strong ties to them. Thanks again and best, cr Fred on "Reconciliation and progress" http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic/reconciliation-and-progress/page/9#post-9175 Fri, 01 May 2009 15:58:01 +0000 Fred 9175@http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/ I don't understand. One of the big issues of the past discussions has been access. And one of the promises has been unrestricted public comment. Are you proposing voluntary limits to public comment? Also, since a large part of the staff leadership has departed/are in the processs of departing, who is left to "capture?" We might want to worry about who knows what's going on. chrisrobling on "Reconciliation and progress" http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/topic/reconciliation-and-progress/page/9#post-9174 Fri, 01 May 2009 15:26:19 +0000 chrisrobling 9174@http://www.riversideinfo.org/forum/ Agency Capture This thread arises from my hope that we as a community supporting three very important governments, the village and Districts 96 and 208, can find ways to encourage reconciliation after the election and progress toward shared goals. This is the fifth post in this series. Some 75+ other posts have been made, all of which are significant and helpful, because more public involvement solves most public problems. As has been said often, this Forum is a fantastic vessel for our involvement, so -- please join in. My prior posts suggest a mechanism for ongoing public dialogue on major issues, a virtual trusteeship (or school board membership), pushing out public agendas via RSS, etc. and an expansion of "public comment" to include recorded comments. Each of these ideas relies on community use of technolgy to equalize information between officials and the public and create points of access for information going both from officials to us and from us to officials. In this post I will suggest a step officals can take, and I hope they will take, to more fully represent us in their work. It is not about technology, but here as well there is need for community action to support our officials and institutions. The original concern referred to by the term "agency capture" arose from a realization that regulators and their regulated tend to share information. Government regulators tended to depend on their private sector counterparts for a good deal of the information they needed to do their regulating. After initial steps to regulate the railroads, and then later in finance and commerce generally, up to today's SEC, FTC or EPA, to name a few, the concern has most basically been formulated as, "will the regulated capture their regulators, and thus divert the regulators from performing their assigned task?" This question fills miles of law library shelves (now towers of data storage) for the benefit of students, professors, judges, government attorneys, big law firms, etc. With the Wall Street meltdown and the failures of Fannie and Freddie, it is a very hot topic. But over time it has also become evident that "capture" through shared expertise was only one form of the phenomena. Capture by other constituencies, such as appointing authorities, legislative overseers and vendors is quite possible, since each has a comparative advantage over the nominal agency heads in terms of accumlated information and resulting power. Personally, I do not think any of these is an ongoing concern here in Olmstedia. Rather, the variant we need to avoid is staff capture. Staff -- the employees -- almost always know more about their agency than the officials they serve. Ask yourself: Who knows more about a school or a village office, someone who is there 40+ hours a week, or the officials who are there typically in the evenings, two or three times month? I am not suggesting that our officials should work harder or longer, nor am I suggesting that our various staffs are anything but loyal and dedicated. What I do suggest is that our agencies themselves, like all such agencies everywhere --in themselves, apart from us -- take on lives of their own in their day-to-day operations. These lives, in turn, inevitably draw the attention of our officials. At a certain point our officials may use more of their time and effort explaining to us why the agency must do things its way, than telling the agency that it must do things our way. If that happens, then they are captured. This day-to-day activity has its own impetus. The urgent, it is frequently said, can overtake the important. Further, the mundane has its own importance. (Bills, for instance, must get paid.) All of such items tend to accrete and color the agency staff chief's (a village manager or superintendent, for instance) view of "next most important item." When that happens, the agency is captured. The agencies subsist in state and federal statutes, regulations, rules, practices and customs that go far beyond our elected representatives' ability to influence. For instance, a village president will most likely be able to have a working meeting with a Congressman, but a village president cannot change administrative EPA rules that determine how waste is dealt with at a municipal garage. The webs of law within which the agencies operate are hugely significant. They cannot be ignored. But at times -- and I think we saw allusions to such circumstances in the recent campaigns -- the web of law of a given agency gives its staff chief a momentum to move an agency in a particular direction. Part-time volunteer elected officials may -- or may not -- have the time and background to discern the subtle difference between activity that is "mandated" and that which is "voluntary." Crossing the threshhold to "voluntary" activity grounded on legal mandates -- instead of official policy -- by definition depletes the agency's ability to respond to its elected representatives when they seek to guide it in their direction, presumably based on ther understanding of what their voters (us) want. If this happens, the agency is captured. Without replaying any of the campaigns and candidate statements one way or another, I personally have experienced over the last several years incidents at each of the institutions mentioned in which I concluded, "this is happening because staff has set it up to happen, not because our officials chose it to happen." And I was wrong. Why? Because, if the elected officials cede to hired staff an authority beyond execution according to law and policy established by our elected representatives, it is not the staff's fault -- it is the officials'. This is where we as residents, taxpayers, voters and activists come in. The quickest way to help officials be swallowed by staff is to not show up at meetings. Several posts ago I argued for video public comment to help those who either cannot or do not want to appear at a public meeting, like single parents with precious litle time. I am not arguing against that idea now. Rather, I think if we can make a meeting -- we should go. We need to keep our links with our elected officials to remind them they are there for us and we are not here for them or their agency. If along the way we have balanced the information supply, we have more to say to them. If we are actively contributing to solving their issues through a "community of practice," mentioned above, better still. If we know the agenda, and have read the board packet, even more so. If we taped our comment so time can be spent on the agenda instead of desultory exchanges, we have paid respect to their time -- and ours. But, if instead, we abandon our officials, then their reliance on senior staff -- and vendors, and employees, and other units of government, etc. skyrockets. Our officials are there to represent us. Staff is there to execute. That means our officials tell the agency it must perform according to law and our policy -- as expressed by them, our representatives. If this does not happen, then the agency is captured.