After discovering that the Hawaiian Homes Commission has started posting some of its meeting minutes online, I thought it might be time to revisit the inventory of department and agency policies done nearly a year ago (“Many state agencies fail to post meeting agendas or minutes online“).
Now that the Governor has directed agencies to post agendas on the official state calendar, I’ll concentrate on the availability of minutes and look at a sample of the same agencies reviewed last year. You can even check back when I made a similar survey back in late 2006. There have been some changes, but not a lot of overall progress since then, it seems.
Department of Agriculture. Grade: F
I followed the links from the Board of Agriculture web site to Board meetings (Home ? Meetings & Reports ? Board of Agriculture Meetings) and found this message: “Minutes of meetings are available upon written request. Please include your name, address, phone number, name of board and date of meeting.”
I couldn’t even find links to the other boards and commissions within the department, which I noted last year, Apparently none of the other boards/committees in the Department of Agriculture have minutes available online, including the Molokai Irrigation System Water User Advisory Board, Honokaa-Paauilo Irrigation System Water User Advisory Board, Advisory Committee on Plants and Animals, and the Advisory Committee on Pesticides.
Employees’ Retirement System. Grade: F
ERS has a link to a list of members of its board of directors, but there is no sign of any meeting minutes.
Hawaii Tourism Authority. Grade: B+
The most recent minutes currently available are from the HTA’s March 29, 2012 meeting.
High Technology Development Corporation. Grade: F
Still no sign of any minutes anywhere on the agency web site.
Contractor Licensing Board. Grade: A
Yes, minutes are available. The most recent set of minutes is for the March 23, 2012 meeting.
Motor Vehicle Industry Board. Grade: B
Yes, minutes available. The most recent minutes are from a February 21, 2012 meeting.
Board of Accountancy. Grade: A
Yes, minutes available and up to date.
Board of Health. Grade: F
No minutes, no mention of the Board of Health, its members, or its meetings on the Department of Health web site. And I don’t see any info on any of the boards or commissions within the Board of Health.
Merit Appeals Board (Dept. of Human Resources Development). Grade: F
No minutes available, although links are provided to the board’s rules, which clearly require both public meetings and publicly available minutes.
Board of Trustees of the Deferred Compensation Plan. Grade: F
No minutes or other information available.
Here’s what I found when searching for the trustees. The instruction was to “click on the following,” but nothing was there.
State Fire Council. Grade: F
Nope, no minutes available, although the council’s most recent annual report, which is available online, had this one-liner: “The SFC continues to meet quarterly to fulfill its statutory duties and responsibilities.”
Hawaii Civil Rights Commission. Grade: F
Still no minutes available.
Hawaii State Ethics Commission. Grade: F
No minutes available online.
Campaign Spending Commission. Grade: A
Minutes available online and up to date.
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interesting to note the following’s bill testimony this year: http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/session2012/Testimony/HB2404_HD1_TESTIMONY_FIN_02-24-12_7_.PDF
bill would have required state boards to post their minutes. bill was tabled at the last minute of this year’s legislature. (do not know if other bills had similar language.)
the interesting part is the following language from the state High Technology Development Corporation: “HTDC agrees that it is appropriate to move digital and make documents more accessible to the public by posting minutes online. We would like to point out for consideration that to accomplish this, all agencies must have administrative control over their websites and/or structure their websites so posting of minutes can be done quickly and easily with minimal cost.” — Written Statement of YUKA NAGASHIMA
Executive Director & CEO
High Technology Development Corporation
before the HOUSE COMMITTEE ON FINANCE
Friday, February 24, 2012
Yes we need to see the minutes. However, these minutes may or may not accurately record what truly took place.
We also need video taping of these meetings.
I think the HTDC comment points to the key obstacles to the posting of agendas, minutes, and documents on-line, especially since there currently is no statuatory requirement to do so.
Budget cuts in my agency have left us so shortstaffed that staff are finding it difficult to keep up with the bare minimum legal requirements of notifications, postings, filings, meeting support, minutes and transcript preparations, transmittals, and archiving.
Preparing the documents to go up on the Web and posting them requires additional staff time and expenses being spent on something which the agency is not legally required to do, when the agency is finding it challenging to keep up with those things it is required to do.
That is why it is unfortunate that HB2404 was tabled after it came out of conference committee.
The main thrust of HB2404 was to allow electronic posting of notices which would have saved agencies thousands of dollars they now pay to print publications.
Those savings would have more than covered the additional staff time and expense needed to meet the HB2404 requirement to post agendas and minutes on-line in formats accessible to “the disabled, elderly, and other individuals who require assistance”
It would be interesting to learn why the House rejected the recommendation of its conferees and decided to table HB2404 rather than pass it with some very reasonable and innocuous amendments.
“Preparing the documents to go up on the Web and posting them requires additional staff time and expenses.”
Would you please enlighten us? It doesn’t seem like this would take a whole lot of time or money.
most kindly note that Yuka Nagashima started LavaNet in 1994 and launched Tiki Technologies in 2003 to develop software for businesses.
And even she is having problems with the state of Hawaii and Web sites!!!!!
I will attempt to provide some enlightment: Most things in Hawaii don’t seem like they should be such a freakin’ bloody headache. But they are. People fail to stick their necks out and change this. And so it continues. That’s it. Very simple.
Hi, Natalie!
Hope this is enlightening.
1) Until I did the research recently, I did not realize that the nearly universally used pdf format is NOT a format accessible to the disabled. The blind use readers that report a picture when they encounter a pdf. So we are on notice that all of the pdf documents we currently have posted will eventually need to be replicated and made available in some other format which our tech guys need to specify.
2. Prior to learning that pdfs were not okay, here is how the process of getting the docs up on the Web worked in my shop.
The originator (say the secretary for the board) prepares the original in Word.
That original is sent to a person who converts it to pdf format, and makes sure that the file is the smallest possible size because we have a limited amount of space available to us for posting on the system (yes, government agencies are in the stone ages with regard to memory space policies and practices, but it is what it is)
Apparently, as the disabled access requirements begin to be enforced, we will probably have to also convert the document into alternative formats that would be posted in parallel to pdf? The tech guys need to tell us what to do. For now we will continue to post pdfs.
The document goes to another part of the agency which is responsible for the care and feeding of the Website and the Webmaster person or persons post the pdf document for us
A message comes back from the Webmaster that the document is posted, and a quality control person goes to the web and looks to see if the links work and the content looks okay.
Multiply this by several boards and commissions and multiple applications and permits and the amount of staff time adds up.
Because staffing and funding have been so challenging, it is understandable why agencies are not volunteering to add the resources needed to put all of their agendas, minutes, and handouts on-line when they are not legally required to.
State Department of Agriculture anticipates a HEPA finding of no significant impact for the reinstatement of Molokai Properties use of the Molokai Irrigation System. See, http://oeqc.doh.hawaii.gov/Shared%20Documents/Environmental_Notice/current_issue.pdf