[Mpls] Board minutes...

[George Janssen]

The Star tribune writes about how the Minneapolis City Council and others
city meetings are on the Internet or planning to go in a growing interest of
the community to keep informed. That is good.
Things are going quite the opposite however with the older Minneapolis city
police pension, the Minneapolis Police Relief Association. The MPRA has had
poor attendance of members at most Board meetings but the MPRA had posted
minutes at their website, www. mpra.net for quite some time. The minutes
began posting on June 8th 1999 and ran continuously until January 13, 2004
when they were removed by Board vote. 
My friends who belong to the MFRA, the Minneapolis Fire Relief Association,
report a similar reluctance to share information regarding their minutes.
They will not provide copies of minutes of past meetings to be taken from
the room or even copied at their office.
Both pensions run close to each other as legislation dealing with one often
reflects in the other. Members of both pensions are not keeping abreast of
situations in their pensions due to what appears to be a suppression of
information to members and the public. There appears to be some common
denominator here and whatever that is it is not good!
William Lundquist, Bloomington

I was having trouble sleeping and thought that the perfect remedy would be  
to read Park Board minutes and if that didn't work surely a web rebroadcast  
would surely do the trick.
What I found was a really strange collection of stuff and a really  
inconsistent recording of board actions.
Sometimes there are things called minutes and they are listed as such at  the 
end of the agenda listings. More recently there isn't any listing of  
recorded minutes but if you click on the agenda, you don't get the agenda you  get a 
"Final Agenda" that lists board actions that were approved. While there  are 
roll call votes occasionally listed, most actions are listed as approved.  
Oddly there are notations when Vivian or Annie are opposed but no such notation  
when there are larger numbers opposed.
 
 The Park Board no longer has Approval of the minutes on its agenda.  It has 
just disappeared.
 Parliamentary Procedure requires approval of the minutes be on the  Agenda 
unless there is a 2/3 vote to suspend the rules.
 
The fact that the meetings are taped only confuses these issues because not  
all of the meeting is recorded. (The cameras were off for last meeting's  
campaign discussion).
There still needs to be a mechanism for an official record of decisions  that 
were made and a way of checking and verifying the accuracy of those  
recordings, i.e. approval of the minutes.
Thanks,
Scott Vreeland   Seward

    Bill Lundquist, in his post, refers to "a common denominator, in the problem of keeping minutes of the MPRA & MFRA board meetings and making them public.  Scott Vreeland alludes to the same problem with Park Board minutes.  
    I can't speak to MFRA or Park Board minutes but I can to MPRA. The MPRA has a long record of the actual meetings not jibing with the minutes released to the members and the public.  There have been additions, deletions, changes and downright lies involved with the meetings and minutes.
    Rather than keep honest minutes the board found it easier and less incriminating to just remove the monthly minutes from their website and send them out only to the few who request them.  At that, when discrepancies are found, the questioning member is called a "liar" and immediately dismissed.
    The common denominator?  They all share the same general council and law firm, Rice & Michael's,  Coincidence?  I think not!

George Janssen
Longfellow