This is just a brief notice.
The abovementioned Vienna Board of Architectural Review meeting will discussion guidelines for MAC buildings. So I guess the Department of Planning and Zoning has read the tea leaves regarding their visual preference survey, and is now prepared to tell us what they say it all means. (You can see my other postings for my doubts about this visual preference survey, and my subsequent criticism of it.)
In their favor, at least they gave us more than their typical less-than-24-hours’ notice. But a) there’s no video of the meeting, and b) the Town typically posts the minutes of the meeting months afterwards.
So if you, the citizen, do not attend, how can you know what happened in a timely fashion? Well, you can read my notes — but then you get my spin. How can you just get the facts, without my interpretation?
For this meeting, I’m going to try something new. As a citizen, I have the right to film any public meeting of any public body of any government entity in Virginia. Says so right here (“Any person may photograph, film, record …”). The Commonwealth of Virginia guarantees that. So I think I’ll give that a try with my $50 video camera. And post the results on Youtube.
My point is, if a cheap video camera, a selfie stick, and Youtube can deliver informative video and audio of the Town’s otherwise-closed meetings, then it’s just kind of dumb not to have video of every meeting available. So that will be my Friday AM experiment. We’ll see how it goes.
