Post #356: INCORRECT, see post #360. In case you’re looking for recordings of Town meetings …

Posted on August 20, 2019

See Post #360.  The important parts of this are wrong.

This text is Town of Vienna policy as posted on this webpage.

The table is from one of the Town’s Granicus web pages.  This is where those recordings used to be posted.  The forlorn little greyed-out right-most column is where Town recordings should be listed.

So, has the Town started slacking off?  Nah.  They just stopped posting them there.  Instead, you can now only access them by clicking links at the bottom of a page on the Town’s website.

There’s actually a good reason to do it this way. It just would have been nice to have had some warning.

Roughly speaking, the Granicus calendar is for the Town’s boards and commissions whose meetings often have significant legal implications, and whose meetings must, by law, be properly publicly announced.  Those are Town Council, Planning Commission, Board of Architectural Review, and Board of Zoning Appeals.

The Town has several other boards and commissions and types of meetings that are not listed on the Granicus legislative calendar.  For those, the public information is much more catch-as-catch can.  You can only find scheduled meetings by looking at the Town’s general calendar (link is on the splash page of the Town’s website).  The availability of (say) an agenda, prior to the meeting, is often a hit-or-miss thing.  But if there is one, you can usually find it by clicking on the agenda link on the individual Town calendar entry.  And any recordings for those were relegated to the bottom of a page on the Town’s website.

But now, all the recordings, of all Town public meetings that are recorded, are located in one place.  You just have to know to look there now, and not on the official Granicus legislative meeting calendar.

The Town still maintains kind of an odd pecking order for what is recorded and what is not.  You can see all the permanent boards and commissions listed on this absolutely squint-inducing page.  Let me blow that list up in the hopes you can read it without difficulty,

Of these, all but three are now recorded and posted.  The three without recordings are:  Windover Heights, Mayor @ Your Service, and Public Art(s) Commission. I’m not sure what the thinking is, but (e.g.) the Public Art(s) Commission will be discussing standards for MAC buildings tomorrow night (8/20/2019).  So that organization, at least, transacts items that directly relate to Town of Vienna business interests.  I have no idea whether there is any general interest in the other two.

To recap:  The Town does a vastly better job of posting timely recordings of meetings, and posting recordings of more meetings, than it did a year ago.  This latest (unannounced) change gathers all the available recordings in one place.  There are still a handful of Town boards that are not recorded.  I don’t know whether that’s intentional (i.e., nobody cares) or whether that’s just an artifact of how that was done in the past.