Mayor, City Council to discuss digital taping of meetings

Date: 6/9/2010

June 9, 2010.

By G. Michael Dobbs

Managing Editor

CHICOPEE -- Members of the City Council, the Law Department, the Mayor's Office, the Information Technology (IT) Department and the City Clerk's Office will meet at 6:30 p.m. June 16 in the City Council chambers to try to reach an accord concerning the audio taping of full council and subcommittee meetings.

City Council President William Zaskey explained while full council meetings are both audio-taped by the council's staff and televised by the city's cable access channel, subcommittee meetings were also being recorded for inclusion on the city's Web site.

He asserted the council had never been told about the practice, which he said has been in operation since October 2009.

Zaskey questioned why Mayor Michael Bissonnette had never sent a "formal letter" to the council concerning the digital recording of the sub-committee minutes.

Zaskey said the mayor never told the councilors that he had requested the IT Department to record the meetings.

Councilors found out about a month ago that members of the city's IT Department were digitally recording the subcommittee meetings. Zaskey said a staff member would set a recording system on a timer approximating the beginning and ending of a meeting.

The IT personnel would then edit out any audio that wasn't within the opening and closing of the meeting and then post the audio to the Web site.

The concern is that private conversations from both the councilors and members of the public attending the meetings were being recorded without their knowledge, he explained.

City Clerk Keith Ratell released a letter to Bissonnette dated June 1 that at a meeting on March 16, 2009 new ways to tape the meetings were discussed but "no decision to go forward was made."

"We ended the meeting in agreement that the president of the council would check with some of his colleagues to see if there was any desire to switch from the current system being utilized. Additionally, I specifically declared to all that I would record the meetings how they (the council) saw fit. Having never heard of the issue again, I gathered there was no interest," Rattell wrote.

The City Council has since sent a cease and desist letter to Bissonnette and the recording has stopped, Zaskey said.

Bissonnette said the separate digital taping of the meetings allowed staff members to post the material to the Web site much quicker as the audio did not have to be converted from analog recordings.

The mayor disagreed with Zaskey and said councilors were aware of the recordings since last year.

Bissonnette maintained that written minutes "are not transparent" and that anyone can tape a public meeting.

"Hopefully, we can iron this out," Zaskey said.