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Recently a commissioner questioned why other elected officials text-ed, responded to email or tweeted during commission meetings and stated that the elected officials could not possibly be paying attention to the citizens. Lets just lay out a few of the issues.
Quite a few of the elected officials have pushed to have paperless meetings, which could save our government lots of money and save lots of trees as well. The problem is that some of the elected officials have refused to move forward on this issue. Is it because they can’t use or do not understand the technology? You be the judge. Send them all an email; tell them why; and ask them all to respond via email and see who does and who does not respond. The fact is that their are those elected officials who just don’t know how to use email and some that have never sent nor responded to an email.
An additional concern expressed was the fact that some commissioners use social media as a means of communication during meeting and it was thought to be disrespectful. Doing meetings, officials often get up to go talk to another official. Would it be more or less distracting to send a text to the other official? Not everyone is good at multitasking.
I tweet during meetings as a way of providing followers real time information about things that are going on in this community that they may not otherwise have access too. I use the computers as a means of responding to citizens complaints. Often times it is more timely, yet I still find the time to pick up the phone to respond to other citizens complaints. I just don’t believe that one source of communication with our citizens trumps all of the rest.
I would be interested in knowing how you feel about this issue.
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