Agenda Item 18: Provide verbatim minutes as needed for important items, by BC

From: Better Cupertino
Date: Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 6:36 PM
Subject: Agenda Item 18: Provide verbatim minutes as needed for important items

To: City Council <citycouncil@cupertino.org>, David Brandt davidb@cupertino.org

Dear Mayor Sinks, Vice Mayor Chang and Councilmembers,

Thank you very much for considering our request for summary minutes for City Council meetings. We understand that the cost would be too high to provide verbatim minutes, as the Planning Commission's minutes, for every Council meeting.

However, we respectful request you to provide verbatim minutes on important topics or development projects or other topics of high interest as needed. This provides. transparency and good governance that the Brown Act is meant to promote. Also, your constituents can read the minutes and see clearly how you reached your decision and how you've brought up their concerns in the deliberation process.
We hope that the Council would consider providing verbatim minutes for important development projects or topics. The cost of providing such verbatim minutes could even be included as a part of the project costs for these development projects or long-term capitol projects like Vallco project or Civic Center Project. Compared with the amount of dollars we are paying the consultants to write reports. The amount to provide verbatim minutes is negligible.
The staff report states "The City Clerk’s office has used a transcription firm in the past at $60 per hour. Each hour of meeting time takes three-six hours of transcription time. For an average five hour City Council meeting, the cost would run at least $900 per meeting for verbatim minutes."
For example, Mayor Rod said that the seismic engineer explained clearly during July 7, 2015 Council meeting that the new City Hall is the best option. If a summary minutes or verbatim minutes is available, Mayor Rod can easily justify the need of a new City Hall since it's readily available in text format. Had a summary minutes is available, one can do text search and easily locate it.
Take a look at the meeting minutes of July 7, 2015 Council meeting when Civic Center Master Plan was approved. Can you understand why the Council approved the new City Hall? What seismic problem is there? Can you even find out what's the cost of the project?

The meeting minutes of Planning Commission has always been pretty detailed. For example, in the minutes of Oct. 20, 014 Planning Commission meeting, you can read it easily to know what each Commissioner said to support or oppose office or residential allocation at Vallco. There is a short summary for each speaker who spoke during Oral Communication or on an agenda item. There is also a summary of staff report, consultant reports, questions to consultants or staff and their answers. Furthermore, one can easily do a word search of Vallco and get to the discussion on Vallco.

The Council made an unconditional commitment to "transparency, good governance and compliance with the Brown Act." The first step is to provide a summary or verbatim minutes for City Council meetings in the same amount of detail as the minutes of Planning Commission meetings.

If such verbatim minutes is provided only for important meetings, either at the request of Council or residents or Commissioners, the cost will
not be so high. Compared with the cost of non-transparent government process, the anxiety it creates among residents not knowing how a decision is derived or what a consultant said to justify the decision and the hours many concerned residents or even staff need to search through the videos, the cost of a few hundred dollars for important issues that have long term effect on the future of Cupertino is not so high.

The cost is negligible especially when it's compared with the large amount we are paying the consultants to write the reports and the amount we are paying them to appear in Council meetings to present and answer questions. What's the use of paying hundreds of thousands dollars to hire consultants to write reports when we cannot even pay $900 extra to get a verbatin minutes to provide residents a clear picture of what transpired in a Council meeting?

 

We hope that the Council would consider providing verbatim minutes for important development projects or long-term capitol projects or other projects of high interest. The cost of providing such verbatim minutes could even be included as a part of the project costs for these development projects or long-term capitol projects like Civic Center Project.

 

Sincerely,

BetterCupertino