HomeMy WebLinkAboutRDA 2 ACTION MINUTES FOR RDA MTGS 07-21-09'-- • Agenda Item RDA 2
~' AGENDA REPORT Reviewed:
~~~~~~-,~ City Manager
~~:~
Finance Director NIA
MEETING DATE: JULY 21, 2009
TO: WILLIAM A. HUSTON, CITY MANAGER
FROM: MARIA R. HUIZAR, CHIEF DEPUTY CITY CLERK
SUBJECT: AUTHORIZE CITY CLERK TO PREPARE ACTION MINUTES FOR ALL
CITY COUNCIL AND REDEVELOPMENT AGENCY MEETINGS
SUMMARY:
The City Clerk's Office requests authorization to prepare Action Minutes of all City Council
and Redevelopment Agency meetings. Digital copies of the meetings may be duplicated for
court proceedings or made available to the residents for a nominal fee to provide official
discussion of items.
RECOMMENDATION:
Authorize the City Clerk's Office to prepare Action Minutes for all City Council and
Redevelopment Agency meetings.
FISCAL IMPACT:
No additional costs to the City associated with this action.
BACKGROUND
The City Clerk is responsible for preparing the minutes of the City Council meetings. These
draft minutes are reviewed and adopted by the City Council before they are considered final.
Once adopted, the Minutes become the only official record of what took place at a meeting
and may be subpoenaed for court purposes.
Minutes are the history and legal record of the City. Minutes are a record of all actions and
proceedings but not a record of discussions. Minutes need not be verbatim and are intended
to refresh the recollection of the members and give the reader sufficient understanding of the
proceedings. Auditors depend on the minutes for proof of authorization of important
expenditures. Originals are filed with the City Clerk and are part of the City's official
permanent records.
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The City broadcasts City Council and Redevelopment Agency meetings on Time Warner
(Channel 3) and Cox Cable (Channel 30). These meetings are shown live and repeated
twice each month. Digital recordings of each meeting are also kept permanently, and may
be purchased for a nominal fee.
Types of Minutes
Minutes can be prepared in several different formats, including Action Minutes, Summary
Minutes, and NarrativeNerbatim. The City Clerk has been preparing Summary Minutes of
the Council meetings, but with the advent of Webcasting and archived media on the Internet,
it is time to rethink our mode of recording and reporting Council actions to the public.
One approach is to prepare Action Minutes instead of Summary Minutes. These Action
Minutes would be complemented by on-demand Webcast of the actual meeting.
Action Minutes have the following information:
• Meeting date
• Indication of whether the meeting is regular, regular adjourned, or special
• Location
• Starting and ending times
• Names of members and staff present
• Description of items
• A listing of speakers and whether they were in favor or opposed to an item
• A statement of action (motion, resolution or ordinance) and how the members voted.
• Any statement by a member that that person announced was "for the record."
If the meeting is a workshop or study session, Action Minutes can be expanded into
Summary Minutes when appropriate.
Summary Minutes
Currently the City Clerk's Office prepares summary minutes that include all of the items
in action minutes with the addition of commentary by members of the public and
Council. The comments of each speaker range from a few sentences to a few
paragraphs.
Summary minutes provide more of a flavor of what happened at the meeting, but have
some inherent difficulties. It can be very difficult to distill 20 minutes of commentary,
questions, and answers while providing the appropriate context. Further, the time it
takes to prepare summary minutes can be much longer than the original meeting.
Readers may not appreciate the additional text since they are usually reading the
minutes to determine only what action was taken.
The technology explosion has resulted in an ever-increasing demand from the public to
provide more information conveniently at its fingertips via the Internet. For that reason in
January of 2008 the City started Webcasting the televised meetings and now Internet users
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can watch those meetings live on computer or the archived meetings at any time using
streaming video. The viewing software operates in the same way as a tape player, with
volume, stop, pause, and fast-forward controls. For those who do not have a computer at
home, the meetings may be viewed on the City Clerk's computers, and the Tustin Library
anticipates that they will be able to offer streaming video when the new library opens in early
Fall of 2009.
The City Clerk's Office offers various methods of producing audio and video recordings of
City Council and Redevelopment Agency meetings. For this reason, Action Minutes should
be the preferred method of written actions by the City Council/Redevelopment and allow
audio and video records to serve as copies of the discussion of the proceedings.
M ria . Huizar,
Chief Deputy City Clerk