I have wanted to listen to some specific items that were discussed a few different City of Glen Rose related meetings. The problem is that, first, not all the City of Glen Rose Town Council meetings are recorded. Second, for the P&Z, BOA and Preservation Baord, these meetings ARE recorded on audio but after the minutes are done from the audio, the audio is deleted. The 4b meetings are not recorded at all. There also doesn't appear to be any type of retention policy set by the City to determine how long they would want to keep audio. Some years back, Peggy Busch told me that the old cassettes were in a back closet that got very hot and that some of the meeting tapes had melted or were otherwise not usable. Since the City is now recording digitally, that is no longer a problem, but then the question is, what type of storage requirements, and should the audio be also made available directly on the City (or other city related entity) website? I believe so. 

Other government entities make audio available and retain it for years. That includes Somervell County Commissioners Court, Somervell County Water District. GRISD also has a website that audio, although I don't believe it is up to date. The Somervell County Hospital District puts video on Youtube from meetings. 

As an example of what a city does, Mike Rawlings of the City of Dallas brought up this issue of retention rates last year.  Note in the article that audio and video recordings of City Council meetings are preserved, with the archive dating back to 1967.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings has ordered a review of a city policy that allows for the destruction of video and audio tapes of public meetings after 90 days.

The mayor asked City Manager A.C. Gonzalez to “evaluate the policy and provide the City Council with cost estimates associated with retaining these records for a longer period of time,” according to a memo Rawlings sent to the Charter Review Commission on Friday.

To me, any person living in Somervell County who wants to be an informed citizen needs to be able to see, hear and think about what goes on at meetings. Especially when rumours are rampant, to be able to hear exactly what was said at a government meeting is critical to democracy. Now, when I have asked for audio, the city, and particularly kudos to Ray and the city secretary, have been very quick and professional in getting a copy of the audio of a particular meeting to me via my open records request, so I have zero beef with that. That said, I would like for the City to make a policy that ALL city-related meetings, including the 4b, be audio recorded, and that the audio be retained according to a liberal retention policy of at least 90 days for meetings other than the city. As icing on the cake, would like the audio to be made available on the new City of Glen Rose website, under transparency. Obviously, it's easy for me to say, there may be issues such as the cost of putting the audio there, or hardware requirements such as the amoutn of disk space, backup issues, etc. But IF that can also be done, that would be great!