Government in the Dark

As previously noted, the recent public hearing held 8/19 on the Vermillion River Collaborative Water Management Plan proceeded without access by the public to any copy, or even a summary, of the proposed plan accessible via the township website.  This seemed quite odd, because the township has been making just about everything else available for public review on the website.  This was conspicuously absent.

Before the public hearing, I emailed Jeff Otto asking that a copy of the Plan be posted on the website, and he made efforts to do that by emailing someone by the name of Dean Johnson, who I'm told actually wrote the Plan.  Here's a copy of the response I received. 

I was told that there was no electronic copy of the Plan.  This is hard to imagine.  Was the plan drafted using an old IBM Selectric, or some pre-settlement hammer and chisel?

Even assuming that what the author meant was that there was no electronic copy suitable for emailing to the general public or posting online (e.g., in a protectable format), the answer still doesn't quite smell right.  It takes less than one minute to convert a Word document to a .pdf document using free software easily downloaded from the internet.  I do it all the time.  It's hard to believe that the maps in the plan were hand drawn rather than obtained by the author as electronic files in .pdf or other graphic format.

This gave me the general impression that someone just didn't want township citizens to know what the Plan said before the public hearing took place.

Of course, a hard copy was said to have been available for review at the town hall.  During the hours the town hall is open, that is -- which of course is when most people are working.

So the Public Hearing proceeded as scheduled Tuesday night.  I got there a little early so I could spend a few minutes paging through the secret Plan before the hearing got underway.  The Plan is about two hundred pages long, filled with many maps and many, many pages of objectives, proposed actions, goals and policies. It looked like an effort to control whatever anyone does that might possibly affect water in any way, shape or form.

Another aspect of the public hearing on the secret Plan I found interesting was that the person said to be the author was not even present for the public hearing.  Perhaps, given the lack of accessibility of the plan itself, no-one was expected to offer any input on it.  Barry Farrington gave some very brief and extremely general comments about the plan before the hearing was opened up for public comment.  She seemed to be trying to make it sound routine, saying things like, all of the townships have to do this.

Don Pflaum and I offered some comments and objections relating to the Plan.  After the hearing, I went over to Jeff Otto and offered to use my scanner to scan the plan into a .pdf document.  He said no, that they would get an electronic version on line on the township website.

When no electronic version was available on the township's website this morning, I took my scanner and laptop over there and scanned it in myself.

For any brave souls wishing to plow through the copy I made, you can access it here (be patient - it's a large file and takes a while to open).  The maps didn't come out too well.  The black and white copy at the town hall that I worked from looks like the original maps may have been in color and then they were photocopied in black and white, which leaves something to be desired in quality and clarity.  Maybe someday we'll be able to view them on line in color.

Comments

[Bill Kuhns]

It could be that what Dean Johnson was trying to say, Carol (and I ain't his translator, thankfully) is that they've been working with and marking up a hard copy, and there is no budget for someone to go through the marked hard copy, rewrite to make it coherent, check the result and call it official. Plus I believe he is saying that the piece is in mid-change and not coherent now.

That said... the law is the law. IMVHO.

Just my guesses, of course.

What you are doing is a monumental amount of work, Carol. Thank you!
Bill

[Carol Cooper]

Bill, your comment shows that, as a nice guy yourself, you try to give others the benefit of the doubt. But the hard copy draft available for review at the town hall is not a marked up hard copy, but a clean draft with no handwritten changes in it.