Boy, Monday night’s Ventnor Town Council (VTC) meeting was a bit of a fruity affair. There was a fair amount of dirt being thrown around the room (more to come on that later) and even calls for councillor resignations (more to come on that that too). As so much took place, we’ll break the report down into subjects, starting with the audio recording of meetings.
Background
Regular readers may remember some time ago that we reported the VTC had passed a resolution to record all VTC meetings.
It took a while before the equipment was purchased and recordings started, but just over a year after the agreement was first made, the VTC started recording their meetings. Well, that was until near the end of last year, when VB noticed this had stopped.
After asking why this was the case at the last meeting (but not really getting a satisfactory answer), we were pleased to see that the VTC had set up equipment at Monday’s meeting to make an audio recording of the discussions.
Cllr Scoccia tries to stop recordings
It was with some surprise that at the beginning of Monday’s meeting Cllr Susan Scoccia, stood up and said she was not happy with the meeting being recorded. She wasn’t able to give a particular reason as to why, just that she didn’t want it happening. We’re not sure what she is so afraid of.
Anyway, after some discussion amongst other councillors and the Town Clerk, Cllr Welsford quoted from minutes of the 9th June 2008 meeting in which it stated “Further to Minute 16 of the last meeting the town clerk reported that the Monitoring officer had confirmed recordings of Council meetings could only take place with the consent of the council and in agreeing to recording the council may set limitation. The Monitoring officer said this should include a condition that the town council may require the deletion from any recording of words which are improper or misleading. It was agreed to allow recording subject to the above condition”
He went on to point out that as the resolution had been passed by the VTC in June 2008 to record all meetings, that the recording would continue.
Background: The reference to deletion of words which are improper was included because of some pretty outrageous quotes from town councillors around that time, such as one councillor referring to parking attendants as ‘little ayatollahs’ and the term ‘nigger in the woodpile’ being used by another. Shocking.
Where are the previous recordings?
But the disbelief in proceedings doesn’t end there.
When Cllr Scoccia went on to ask what had happened to previous recordings of meetings (they have never been made available to the public anywhere online), it was revealed that the Town Clerk, Tina Bailey had given the original memory card, which holds all recordings, to a member of the public.
Without taking any copies!
From what we could gather, the recording had been requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
We’re absolutely stunned that the Town Clerk gave away the only recording of the meetings and didn’t think to take copies. A simple procedure that would have taken just minutes to do.
Image: visual.dichotomy under CC BY-SA 2.0
