October 5, 2005 Accountability and openness

Accountability was the theme of my campaign for County Commission just over three years ago.

Now you see the word everywhere!

Citizens everywhere are bringing their cries for more accountability and openness to their local governments--city and county. Citizens also bring their ideas and proposals and their thank-yous and complaints to their local governmental bodies as well.

Meetings of the Hamblen County Commission are probably the most open and citizen-friendly of all government meetings at the local level. I sincerely hope that they remain so.

When the current Commission took office in September 2002, one of the first proposals was to allow public comments at the beginning of each meeting. If citizens sign up in advance of the meeting through the County Mayor's Office at 586-1931, they can have up to 5 minutes to speak to the Commission. Even if they do not sign up in advance, they can still speak at the meeting, but they are limited to 3 minutes.

Any time you open up a part of a public meeting as the Commission has, you will have a number of speakers with comments on a wide range of topics. The comments obviously need to be civil and should relate to Commission business.

Allowing the public to speak at the Commission meetings (and at Committee meetings as well) is an important way of serving the public and increasing citizen involvement. This policy is very important, and I will continue to support allowing public comments at the beginning of our meetings.

Another important initiative of this commission has been taping and televising the regular monthly meetings of Commission on Charter and Comcast cable channels. This, too, has sparked citizen involvement and has increased awareness about what the County Commission does.

Although televising Commission meetings had not been done before, Commissioner Nancy Phillips, Commissioner Tom Lowe, and I made it a central proposal of our campaigns in 2002. When we started the taping in late 2002, Commissioner Phillips and I secured the sound equipment and microphones at no cost to the county.

We still use that equipment today, but now we have added two special (and expensive) cameras that Commissioner Phillips helped secure from Charter Cable at no cost to the county.

PS: The meetings are taped from an elevated area at the rear of the courtroom that was especially built to provide a good vantage point for the cameras. This elevated platform was built at no cost to the county after I asked a very special constituent (my husband Ron) to provide the materials and labor for this.

I would like to see and I am going to continue to push for the taping of committee meetings as well. Most of the discussion about county business takes place in committee meetings which are held on the second Monday of each month, beginning at 3:00 pm. These meetings are open to the public, but many people can't attend meetings that begin that early in the afternoon.

With cameras and equipment already in place, I think committee meetings should be taped and televised. Then, if citizens watched a committee meeting and realized that a topic of concern to them was being considered in committee, they could be sure to come to the Commission meeting 10 days later and let their opinion(s) be known before any vote was taken.