Letter: Televised meetings shouldn’t be complicated

The letter below was written by Mr. Don Watson and appears online and in print in  last weeks edition of the Independent.

I had been waiting to post this letter until I was able to post the video of the May 7, 2012 meeting of the Middletown Township Committee which is located in the previous post, so that readers could relate to the video and what is written in the letter more coherently. 

Until this past February, Mr Watson had been writing the "It's Your Town" e-newsletter, which chronicled the happenings at Middletown Township Committee meetings and was sent to over 500 resident email boxes and posted on this blog.

Now however, instead of writing the newsletter, he has been video taping these meetings and posting them online for residents to watch, seeing how the Township Committee has came up with every excuse in the book over the past few years, not to record them themselves and post the recordings online at the Township's website or broadcast them over the township's municipal public access cable channels.

A recent article discussed that televising the Middletown Township Committee meetings (“Televising meetings becomes partisan issue in Mid’town,” April 26) has come to be a political issue this election year; however, it was the Township Committee members that first politicized this otherwise nonpartisan issue. Making government business available to the public should not be a political issue, but a right citizens have to see their elected representatives debate and decide on issues that directly impact their quality of life.

Over the last few years, many residents from across Middletown have appeared before the committee to request that its meetings be televised on the township-controlled cable access channels. Yet each time a request was made, the committee came up with a different reason why the township could not — or rather, would not — provide this service to its residents: it was too expensive, they would need to hire a videographer or people would use it to grandstand.

As residents kept asking for televised meetings, I began producing an e-newsletter consisting of an objective, play-by-play review of the discussions during Township Committee meetings as a way to inform residents. It was more detailed than the minutes produced by the township and was well received by the over 500 or so residents that signed up to receive it monthly. When it became clear that the committee members would not move to televise their meetings, I decided to shift my effort from the newsletter to video recording. I received overwhelming support in the form of donations from all parts of town to purchase video recording equipment and, in February, I began video recording committee meetings and posting the full, unedited segments on Internet Archive. The videos have enough hits, showing that there is public interest in our local government at work.

I offer a DVD of each meeting to the committee to be replayed on public access channels, but the committee came up with more excuses: first, they questioned the completeness of the video and, now, they state if they accept my video, they would need to accept any video produced by any resident. They are making this more complicated than it is. Sunshine laws were enacted to ensure transparency in government. Making video recordings of meetings available on public access cable takes that intent one step further to truly open meetings to all residents, not just those who have the means to make it to meetings in person. Despite the committee’s attempts to turn this into a political issue, partisanship has no place here. I make the meeting videos available to whoever wants to see them. For now, that will have to be on the web until further notice.

As stated in the letter, you can watch Mr. Watson give a copy of his video recordings to the Township Committee at the 61 minute mark of the May 7, 2012 recording previously posted. It is taken courteously from him with no intention whatsoever of  being watched, posted online or broadcasted by the Township Committee for others to watch, which is a shame.

 I can't make it to Township Committee meetings as often as I would like so I find these recordings very informative and enlightening. I think others would also if given broader access to them.