Norwalk Launches New City Web Site

The city of Norwalk has just revealed their new web site. And here’s what they have on the front page:

Please note our website is best viewed with Internet Explorer 7 or 8

Read on…

Ah yes because taxpayer money is used here’s some best practices noted on the web:

It is a sure sign of bad design, when a website posts a requirement that the viewer must use a specific browser to access the information in the site.

It is inappropriate for a taxpayer-funded organization to restrict access to its website by posting a requirement that the viewer must use a specific browser.

All taxpayer-funded websites should be designed to work properly with a variety of browsers and to be viewable on a representative variety of monitor screen sizes.

Any taxpayer-funded website should work properly when viewed with any of the most-used browsers — IE (for both PC and Mac), Netscape, Firefox, Safari and Opera, at least.

Any taxpayer-funded website should work properly when viewed with any monitor screen from a width of 800 pixels to 1280 pixels.

Oh just go to source, anybowser.org.

  • OLD TIMER

    Not knowing that much about building a website, I don’t see any big improvement over the old website. Minutes of meetings held a week ago should be available online within a few days. I think the FOI law requires minutes be “available for public inspection” in 48 hours. They need to find a way to make minutes available that quickly.

  • Peter Orehek

    They spent $100 to skin the old site? Amateur hour.

  • Secondhand Rose

    Unless they’ve changed the regulations after 2007, it’s my understanding that FOIA requires meeting minutes be posted within 7 days of the meeting.

    • Norwalk Spectator

      From my understanding, the minutes need to be available within seven days, however, the actions apparently are being released within 48 hours.

  • OLD TIMER

    The votes (actions) should be available within 48 hrs and the complete minutes within 7 days, under the FOI law. There is no good reason why draft minutes can’t be posted the following day.

    Sec. 1-225. (Formerly Sec. 1-21). Meetings of government agencies to be public. Recording of votes. Schedule and agenda of meetings to be filed. Notice of special meetings. Executive sessions. (a) The meetings of all public agencies, except executive sessions, as defined in subdivision (6) of section 1-200, shall be open to the public. The votes of each member of any such public agency upon any issue before such public agency shall be reduced to writing and made available for public inspection within forty-eight hours and shall also be recorded in the minutes of the session at which taken, which minutes shall be available for public inspection within seven days of the session to which they refer

    • Secondhand Rose

      You ever try taking minutes from these meetings? Some of them run into 8 or 9 pages or more, and that’s after significant editing. I can remember a couple of Conservation Commission and Zoning Commission meetings that didn’t end until 1am and were continued into another day. Minutes for most of these meetings take 3-4 days just to get to the “draft” state, never mind finished approvable minutes. Multiply that by 4 to 6 meetings a week, and you have the poor transcriber working up to 6 hours a day for an entire week just to keep up.

    • Sick of this

      This constant quest for instantaneous “transparency” is becoming another boon doggle.

      The Council, the Board of Education, Board of Estimate and Taxation the Planning and Zoning and the ZBA all have audio tapes done at the time of the meeting. Right then and right there. Council meetings are broadcast live on cable. The Council and the BOE have video tapes made also. The results of the Council votes are emailed within 48 hours. If someone has that pressing of a need to hear every golden word spoken at a meeting, they can do any of the following:

      1. personally attend the meeting and bring a tape recorder or a video camera if needed.

      2. request to hear the audio tape after the meeting

      3. watch the meeting on cable TV (not sure of the channel since I personally don’t have cable)

      Stop beating on the secretaries who take the minutes. They are not robots. They are professionals who work hard at their jobs. And if you don’t believe that, try taking the minutes at a meeting yourself. Don’t believe me, ask Turfie. In the past, she has done running commentaries on Council meetings and posted it shortly afterwards.

      With all the other avenues of recording available, I can’t understand why people keep whining and moaning about the minutes not being available almost as soon as they walk out of the door of the meeting. Even newspaper reporters have to take time to write their stories. This constant moaning about having draft minutes as soon as the next day is ridiculous since there are videos, audios, newspaper articles and action minutes available.

      Lighten up.

  • OLD TIMER

    Yes Rosie, I have. It is a job and it takes time. Spreading the time over several days does not make it any easier. You make it sound like working full time as a paid stenographer is a bad thing. With the equipment they use today, most of the stenographers can easily have the minutes finished within 24hrs. I am not making the rules, I just cut and pasted from the FOI law.

    • Secondhand Rose

      It’s a full time job to take City meeting minutes and believe me it’s not paid full time wages by any means. I did it for several years. Norwalk’s meetings as well as two other cities. Harbor Commission, Conservation Commission, Common Council, Zoning, Board of Ed, Parks & Rec, just to name a few.

      At that time we used manual tape recorders and took notes and then had to go back and listen to the meeting tapes for hours on end to get the correct info into the minutes.

      Just think, if the original meeting ran 2 to 3 hours or longer (and the average meeting time was usually 2 hours), we had to go back and listen to those tapes 3 or 4 times or more, many times from start to finish in order to be sure we had the exact wording of motions and pertinent comments for EACH meeting.

      Now multiply that many hours times 3-4 meetings a week times 2-3 towns’ worth of meetings…..It’s not anywhere as “easy” as you make it seem, my friend. Compensation for the time taken was nowhere near what it was worth, which is why I no longer do it.

  • Sick of this.

    Okay Old Timer,

    “I am not making the rules, I just cut and pasted from the FOI law.”

    Where EXACTLY does it say in FOI that draft minutes have to be posted within 48 hours???

    By the way, your comment about working on a set of minutes over a period of time doesn’t make it easier is BS. Sometimes you have to think about three things: what someone said, what you heard and how you are going to write it. Having some time to think about what someone said gives the secretary a chance to understand what was going on.

    But apparently, you can do the job better, so I suggest you contact the City and apply for the job. We’ll all expect your minutes to be posted within 48 hours, and flawless.
    Good luck.

  • OLD TIMER

    If you really read the “cut & paste”, you know it doesn’t say that. It says;
    “The votes of each member of any such public agency upon any issue before such public agency shall be reduced to writing and made available for public inspection within forty-eight hours and shall also be recorded in the minutes of the session at which taken, which minutes shall be available for public inspection within seven days of the session to which they refer”
    Votes within 48hrs, minutes within seven days, required by law.
    I said there is no reason draft minutes cannot be done and posted the followng day. That is my opinion, not the law. Rosie says that they don’t pay enough for the people taking the minutes to work full time and that is why she stopped doing it. In this day and age, it should be a well paid, full time, job and the best available present technology should be used. If that happened, minutes could routinely be posted the day after any public meeting. The City does not make good use of technology. The person taking minutes should be able to get high quality audio recording and make notes as the meeting progresses. There is no requirement for minutes to be verbatim, word-for-word. A lot of statements at a meeting are summarized. A politician arguing against a proposition before the council, on economic terms for five minutes, can be summed up with “Mr xxxx objects to the price”
    Getting the job done, posted, and accurate, in 48 hours, is not that difficult, in my opinion, if the right people are being well paid to get it done. I am well past looking for another job, and the City is not interested in hiring the right people to get the job done. Minutes are done now by an outside contractor because somebody decided years ago it was cheaper. Look at the rates the City pays and decide for yourself if you couldn’t do the job better with in-house employeees. The people doing the work may not be well paid, but the agency they work for is. I’ll bet they don’t get benefits and are paid as independent contractors, just like McMahon’s wrestlers.

    • Sick of This

      I still say that if you are so eminently qualified to opine in the manner that you do – then apply for the job. Or start your own agency that can do the job quicker, more accurately and with better pay for the staff.

      Clearly you are unhappy with the agency that provides the minutes and the Federal guidelines, since you keep harping on them.

      Rather than just whining about it, go out and do a better job.

  • john carvel

    I am not sure that it has to be posted on a website. They could simply post them on a wall at city hall and anyone who wants to go there could read them.

  • Secondhand Rose

    Having sat in on plenty of City meetings in which quite a lot of information was given and discussed on all sides and then having had to condense these meetings into a mere 3-4 pages’ worth of minutes I would emphatically state that even though minutes “don’t have to be” verbatim, they OUGHT to be.

    Too many times too much information is lost by the editing process. Furthermore, where does the transcriber draw the line? I was never comfortable with being responsible for deciding what to put in and what to leave out, therefore my minutes usually ran to 6 or 8 pages. (Which turned out to be a good thing in several cases, particularly during the multiple Conservation Commission meetings regarding the first Norden Place project that was eventually rejected by the City. But it made my life a living hell trying to get all these various meeting minutes done within the required FOIA time frame.)

    • Just Saying

      I do court transcripts and you are way off base claiming that minutes should be verbatim transcripts. Depending on the number of members and how long the meeting goes, it can literally run hundreds of pages.

      I guess you didn’t read “Sick of This’s comments which I am copying here vertbatim:

      The Council, the Board of Education, Board of Estimate and Taxation the Planning and Zoning and the ZBA all have audio tapes done at the time of the meeting. Right then and right there. Council meetings are broadcast live on cable. The Council and the BOE have video tapes made also. The results of the Council votes are emailed within 48 hours. If someone has that pressing of a need to hear every golden word spoken at a meeting, they can do any of the following:

      1. personally attend the meeting and bring a tape recorder or a video camera if needed.

      2. request to hear the audio tape after the meeting

      3. watch the meeting on cable TV (not sure of the channel since I personally don’t have cable)

      Clearly you are out of touch. You said you took minutes for the Conservation Committee. Why didn’t you do verbatim minutes? Why did you leave things out?

      With so many overlapping forms of recording, you want to add another layer and have the City spend more money?

      You guys are all nuts.

  • NRWKParent

    For my money, I didn’t think that Parks and Rec could get any worse. That was until I went to check the website for my softball schedule. Now not only are the fields in poor condition, the umps brutal, the amount of money each team spends versus where it goes (an addition to Gerald’s house perhaps?) very questionable but the website is awful too! Way to go Norwalk. Maing us proud to be residents once again!

    BTW
    I know it is not important as minutes before someone torches me on it. (except the part where someone should make Gerald open the books on the money. $600 per team times 15 – 20 teams per night times 6 nights a week . . . well that’s about $65k a year just for softball!)

  • Norwalk Spectator

    This is all a very interesting discussion and such, but why is this a whole thread bashing the secretarial services that provide the minutes rather than discussing the City website?

    To NRWL Parent, I know of at least two other cases where minutes, agendas or other items were supposedly posted and then either never came up or in one case, actually disappeared before my very eyes. Now you see it, now you don’t, sort of thing. I suspect based on what I heard from the incident of the disappearing document, that the staff member posted the document and received some kind of confirmation to that effect. Then who knows what happened in the world of cyberspace because it was there and then it wasn’t. The staff member didn’t know it had disappeared until I called and said so, after numerous attempts to relocate it.

    As for your comment about Mr. Foley, I think you are on very, very thin ice with that.

    • NRWKParent

      Spectator – I assume you meant someone elses post. However, you are right the website is an issue but the content (or lack thereof) is the issue.