From the Twin Falls Times-News
BURLEY • Cassia County Commissioners voted Monday to improve government transparency by approving audio recordings of their weekly business meetings.
Commissioners had first balked at taping their meetings, which the county clerk had begun to do after the board was caught violating government transparency laws at least three times in the past year.
But their concerns about added costs were assuaged Monday, and commissioners voted to embed links to the recordings in the minutes of their meetings on the county’s website, www.cassiacounty.org.
The move will help save the clerk time, since he won’t have to provide such detailed meeting minutes to accompany the recordings.
“I like the new format and I like the simplicity and directness to the point,” Commissioner Paul Christensen said.
The commissioners had criticized Clerk Joe Larsen’s minutes, which were 15 or 16 pages long, and the time it took the commissioners to read them.
Last week, the commissioners questioned the costs of storing the files and whether recording the meetings was going over the statutory minimum required. The discussion came after the commissioners admitted to open meeting violations earlier this year.
Larsen, who was out of the country during last week’s meeting, said the storage costs are irrelevant. For $220 he can buy a hard drive that will store 68 years worth of audio minutes.
“My reason for changing up the minutes was for transparency and accountability,” Larsen said.
The clerk said he was producing “voluminous” minutes since last summer because the public had asked him to do it and that he often spent his own time on the weekends performing the task.
Larsen said the minutes by law are an official record and can not ever be destroyed.
“I can’t answer what the lifetime of the recording would be. But what would be the point of destroying records like that?” Larsen said.
“If you are worried about something you said, maybe it was inappropriate to say it in the first place,” Larsen said.
The clerk is required to sign off on the minutes, and the audio provides him with a way to satisfy that statutory obligation. Larsen said he would continue to record the meetings unless the commissioners signed a resolution that forced him to stop.
Christensen questioned whether the storage format could be updated as needed.
“In the 1970s and 1980s floppy discs were popular. Technology changes over 65 years,” Christensen said.
Larsen said the storage can be migrated to other methods of storage and could even be burned to double-sided Blu-ray discs.
“Storage is becoming less and less significant all the time,” he said.
From the Twin Falls Times-News