No Public Meetings In The Next Month?
As my parents are getting ready for us to drive first to my niece’s house, and then to one of my brothers’ house, for Christmas I thought I’d get a little stuff done. First on my list is to look into the upcoming Planning Commission meeting.
I’ve attended Planning Commission meetings before but I typically don’t track them as closely as I do the Preservation Board. That is about to change. The first step is finding out the meeting date, time and location.
I went to the city’s Public Meetings & Notices page and got what you see at right.
“There are no public meetings listed at this time.”
I used the “in the past 12 months” tab to determine the Planning Commission meets on the first Wednesday of each month at 5:30pm (1015 Locust, 12th Floor Board Room). This makes the next meeting of the Planning Commission on January 4th, 2006.
Other meetings likely occurring in the next 30 days, but not listed, are the St. Louis Development Corporation, Tax Increment Financing and Land Reutilization Authority. For those of us that don’t subscribe to the paper that publishes printed notices, the city’s website is our only means of public notice. Most likely this is a first of the year software issue, not a lack of actual meetings.
What does it say about our city’s website that the very site designed to tell us about meetings 31 days in advance has failed to actually do so. Is anyone actually checking their work or responsible for making improvements? This was the same problem last year.
I did a post on December 5, 2004 about this site. From what I can tell, nothing has changed in over a year. Most of the public notices listed don’t give you enough information to know what they are talking about. Many don’t have agendas. The ones that do have agendas, like the Planning Commission, often reference obscure information like city blocks and proposed project names so unless you are part of the inner circle you won’t know what it is about.
We need people to be involved in this city, at all levels. If we are going to get to that point we will need our elected and appointed officials to make information available to the public. Together we can work wonders for this city.
– Steve
Hi Steve:
Good catch.
The person who used to post all the SLDC/CDA/PDA public meetings no longer works for the agencies. Now that responsibility has been delegated to other folks who already have a lot on their plates.
With the holiday season, I suspect nobody thought to post the next year’s worth of schedules. They do have to be manually entered; it’s a pretty simple system that CIN hopes to overhaul in the coming months. However, that may take a while given that one of the web programmers is on an extended leave.
I’ll try to follow up on this myself next week. The detailed agenda posting sometimes happens last minute, but it is generally a verbatim copy of what’s given out to commissioners. So, yeah, it can be pretty jargon-loaded.
The “last 12 months” page was something I added some time ago, when I noticed folks on one of the e-mail lists complaining about meetings “disappearing.”
That particular web page is just set up to automatically display only meetings coming up in the future. Like I said, it’s a pretty simple set-up.
Again, thanks for noticing this. I agree that we all need to work harder to get information to the public in a more timely and thorough fashion.
By the way, you can probably get an idea of the meeting schedules from the 2005 version of the individual board pages on the SLDC web site:
http://stlouis.missouri.org/sldc/
Unfortunately, this doesn’t cover Planning or Preservation.
Anyway, best of luck and Happy Holidays!
You might want to post the monthly meeting of the Mt. Pleasant Neighborhood Association – usually at 7:00 PM on the 4th Wednesday of the month at The Charless Home, – parking at 4430 Nebraska. Contact Joe Davis (706-0674) for details.
Also, the Carondelet Community Betterment Federation will hold its monthly meeting at The Charless Home – parking at 4430 Nebraska – on Friday, February 3rd at Noon. Call Sister Mary Charles Buford (752-6339) for details.
Cheers! Gary Sluyter