County talks more seriously about website upgrades

“I’m really surprised someone hasn’t hacked it yet,” he said. Wow! The county website has been an embarrassment for years while the commissioners kick the can down the road. The most recent minutes for them and the council are over 2 years old. Let's hope the new commissioner and auditor take action now before things get even worse.

I wonder if the updated website is going to have minutes from the commissioners meetings made available again? Auditor Lori Hallett stopped putting them online two years ago, which also happened to be the same month I was asking for copies of minutes and other public records from the auditor's office about the jail hvac project I was curious about, and her and Jim Ensley (county attorney) were giving me a hard time about it... sorry, everyone. I guess maybe coincidence, but they make it sound like there's some weird computer problem that is unfixable and preventing adding new minutes, just sounds odd.

Same applies to Greencastle Common Council. No recent minutes are posted. Would love to see a response from County Commissioners and Common Council to this in the Banner Graphic comments. Sure seems like none of you care about being transparent, or do none of you read your local paper? Is anybody there?

3M50 -

https://cityofgreencastle.com/common-council-minutes/

sesjohnson94: your link only gives minutes through 2019.

I see them complete and up to date through 2020. The format changes at the end of 2018,maybe that has something to do with it (and browser type).

Thank you sesjohnson94. I had to use a different browser to get through 2019. 2020 appeared to be there, but was taking forever to download.

Just a suggestion for the council:

how about a drop down menu for each year, with a drop down menu for documents in that year, so one would only need to download minutes that they wanted to see as opposed to having to download entire years of minutes.

Use the KISS principle.

Thanks!

I know Vince is a talented Web developer. Good choice!

Here's the story about what I mentioned in my previous comment: In 2018 I read an article about the commissioners meeting that talked about getting bids for replacing the jail hvac system. It said the commissioners picked the company that was $30,000 more expensive than the lowest bid, even though they said all three bids were for the same thing. They said this was because the company they chose would also replace the wiring, where the other two companies would reuse existing wires. They also said the company they chose was better because it had been in business for a long time. Plus, it said they were going to pay for the project using money from other funds besides the jail fund because the jail didn't have much money left. I wanted to learn more because it initially sounded to me like the commissioners were possibly willing to “waste” $30,000 of tax dollars on a higher bid, and then using that higher cost as a reason to use funds from other sources so the jail could keep their money.

I was really curious why a building that is only twenty years old need new wires, wiring doesn't usually need replaced like that. Also, I googled about the company with the lowest bid, and they advertised on their website that they had installed systems for Walmart, Amazon and Google, and were obviously an experienced company.

To try to understand better, I stopped by the Auditor's office to get a copy of the three bids/proposals and the meeting minutes. The bids didn't really help me understand much, since the two losing bids didn't have very much in detail. The winning bid listed parts and more detail about what they would do, but not much help to me. Then I realized that the second page was missing. There was supposed to be three pages, not two. When I went back to get it from the Auditor's office, Mrs. Hallett said she didn't have it. So I wrote a records request letter to the jail and spoke with their attorney, who gave me a copy of the bid that included all the pages. But the missing page didn't add anything except a list of more parts. However, the bottom of the third page said that they would reuse as much existing parts and wiring as possible, so I still didn't understand why they said they were re-wiring the hvac system.

I wanted to see the minutes of the commissioners meeting, but they weren't done being typed up yet. So I asked Mrs. Hallett to have a copy of the notes that were being used to create the minutes. She said no, and said she would have Jim Ensley call me to discuss it. After talking to him, he asked me give him a few days, and several days later he emailed me a completed copy of several of the commissioners meeting minutes I was wanting that weren't available, but no notes. Apparently, they worked quickly to finish the minutes in a few days instead of the usual weeks.

I just want to also share about speaking with Mr. Ensley, that he made a comment to me about not liking the formal records request letters I was writing, expressing his dislike of the last paragraph where it would say something like “according to the statute, you have 24 hours to respond to this request...” and it would go on basically laying out the statute regarding the request. I guess he thought it wasn't worded nice enough, but that was always funny to me because I literally copy and pasted that whole paragraph (pretty much the whole letter) from the sample records request letter in the Public Access Counselor's handbook.

I never learned anything more to help me understand the matter, other than I guess it's possible that the bids weren't really all three for the same project (except for new wires), and that the accepted bid had a long list of new parts the others didn't. It's hard to imagine the need to replace low voltage signal wires inside a building that's only twenty years old for no reason than they're old, wires don't go bad like that. But I think the reason why they didn't want me to have a copy of the notes from the commissioners meetings is because there aren't any. After reading through several meeting's minutes, I realized from the detail of the conversations described that the minutes must be produced from listening to a recording. If that's the case, then the recording of the meetings would also be a public record that the public could request. That shouldn't be a big deal though, there are many counties that record all their meetings on youtube or other video or audio available on their websites. It's also a fact that most Indiana counties have their minutes available on their website through the end of 2020. The reason why I wanted the notes was because the minutes weren't available. Most of the time the minutes were taking a month to be approved, sometimes six weeks later. If someone had an objection to an action taken by the commmissioners, the law only gives 30 days to petition the local court to try to stop the action. So unless you attend the meeting, by the time you can see the minutes there's nothing you can do about it. Luckily, Mr. Jernagen is keeping us informed about some of the important issues at the meetings. I was also told that Mrs. Hallett had been missing working a lot around that time for personal reasons, the reason given why the minutes were so behind from being completed. The last minutes posted on the county website was in June 2018. I have the minutes from 8/20/18 showing the minutes from July and August being approved, this was the same meeting discussed in the article about the hvac system. But the minutes were never put on the website again after that.

Raker, it sounds like you should file a complaint through the Indiana Public Access Counselor. The county officials are giving you the run-around and they know it, hoping you give up.