Transparency Marches On “There is none so blind as he who will not see.” – traditional paraphrase of Jeremiah 5:21. With absolutely no fanfare, November 7, 2011 marked the next step in transparency in the City of Richardson. At 5:30 p.m., the City staff loaded the City's website with copies of that evening's worksession handouts in PDF. Why is this news? Because for the first time, I could follow the presentations not by squinting at the screen but by looking at them on my iPhone. In previous years, City staff would prepare presentations (mostly in Microsoft Powerpoint) to present to the City Council at worksessions and, to a lesser extent, Council meetings. As a courtesy (and because the Powerpoints were often illegible on the screen in the Richardson Room where the worksessions take place), the City staff would print a number of copies of these Powerpoint sessions and pass them out to the public. The staff would economize by printing the copies for the public in black & white (the Council got color), but even so, the staff often printed 20-30 or more copies even though the number of residents at the meeting might be 5 or 10. Obviously, it was totally unpredictable how many residents would show up on any given night. In the summer of 2009 with the full support of the Council, the City staff accelerated a series of transparency measures (see City Council Regular Meeting Documents). Video of the worksessions and Council meetings was made available on the City's website both live and recorded for later viewing. The official Agenda Packet was placed online at the same time as the official Agenda for the "next" meeting was posted at City Hall (72 hours in advance of the meeting). And the handouts were posted on this same page 24 hours after the meeting. It was hoped that most handouts would be published with the Agenda Packet; thus, the public would be able to print the Powerpoint slides at home and read the printed slides along with the Council during the meeting. Only slide decks that were unfinished or updated at the last minute would need to be in the separate “Handout” column on the City website. However, over time, it came to pass that few handouts were being placed online with the Agenda prior to the meeting, so they were not available to the public until 24 hours after the meeting. And since, as noted above, the Powerpoint slides are often illegible when displayed during the meeting, the public was left squinting and moving seats to try to get a better view. The City has now solved this problem. The Powerpoint slides decks are now placed under the Handouts column on the City Council Regular Meeting Documents page as of 5:30 p.m. on the evening of the meeting. Since the City provides free Wi-Fi Internet access in City Hall and since the documents page referred to here is on the public part of the City's website, any resident with an iPad, iPhone, laptop computer, or other device that can browse the Internet can download and view the handouts electronically in their seats both at City Hall but also at home if watching the Council meeting live. The result? Paper is no longer wasted, yet the public has the same access to information being discussed that it always did. So why the strange quotation at the top of this editorial about "there is none so blind as he who will not see?" Because just recently, an out-of-town website author and a local anti-Richardson blogger both badly stubbed their toes. Both accused Richardson Heights Neighborhood Association president Andrew Laska of having inside information from an executive session of the City Council. It seems that Mr. Laska had posted on a Tuesday morning in October that "Big News [is] coming soon for Richardson Heights!" This "Big News" was eventually revealed to be the fact that the Council had authorized the City Manager to purchase 4 lots in the heart of the Richardson Heights neighborhood, in order to convert the four lots into a "pocket" park. This acquisition was funded in the 2010 bond election. The two anti-Richardson commentators had assumed that since they didn’t know about this, that Mr. Laska must have been privy to some confidential information from the executive session held the evening before Mr. Laska's posting on Facebook. Unfortunately for their credibility, on the day before Mr. Laska’s Facebook posting, while there had indeed been an executive session on this matter, there was also an open meeting after the closed session ended, and the Council passed a resolution authorizing the City Manager to take action on those lots. Since this was in open session, there was absolutely no reason why Council members and other witnesses couldn’t call Mr. Laska to announce the good news, and so they did. And for all that these two commentators spend so much time whining and complaining that the City hides all sorts of information that should be public, this second open session (the one after the closed session) was televised on the Internet in real time and was archived for later viewing as well. Had these two taken advantage of the transparency initiatives that the City has already implemented, they both might not have ended up looking so foolish.   Hence the quote – there are indeed none so blind as those who will not see…even a little Internet video… Congratulations to the City for taking the next step in transparency! William J. ‘Bill’ McCalpin Richardson, Texas