11/16/2004 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Council Minutes of 11/16/2004 boards, departments or other experts for input. The second part is the Planning Commission shall consider such input and recommendations from the boards, departments, the public and the applicant's experts. Section 1126.08 is referral by the Planning Commission to Council. There were no changes in that. There were no changes in Sections 1126.09, 1126.10 and 1126.11. The committee unanimously recommended approval of 2004-153 with the amendments as just stated. Councilman Gareau made a motion to amend Ordinance 2004-153 as discussed in committee and as set forth above. The motion was seconded by Councilman McKay and passed unanimously. Ordinance 2004-153 is amended. AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION Charles Dial, 27959 Gardenia, is involved in a continuing disagreement with the Finance Director regarding his request for "machine readable ASCII text files containing the output of the vouchers payable history reports for all vendors from 1996 to date..." which she has determined cannot be accommodated because the referenced reports are not capable of being produced as machine-readable ASCII text files by the AS400 computer without machine or software modification. He believes that to be untrue, and he feels that no software or machine modification is necessary for her to produce the information he is requesting. Law Director Dubelko has provided the Finance Director with a legal opinion regarding this public records request. Mr. Dial believes the Finance Director has chosen to twist the intent of the opinion by contending either that processing purchase orders or that using the network bridge for her payroll direct deposit system is not part of her normal operations. He said there appears to be an established pattern of actions in this matter that could be perceived as stonewalling and trying to prevent information and/or events from becoming public, and have needlessly presented the appearance of impropriety. Finance Director Copfer answered that she and Mr. Dial have discussed and spoken about his requests on numerous occasions, and she has provided the information he requested on every purchase order with a paper copy. She is not hiding public records. A report that's five hundred plus pages cannot be downloaded without hiring an AS400 consultant. That is not an integral part of her normal operations. The payroll process by which we do direct deposit is a modification to the system. Mr. Dial has the information, but it is not in the way he wishes so that he can query information. She respects that, but she is not going to spend the public's money on hiring a consultant for something that is passe because we are going to a new system. She has told Mr. Dial that she is in the process of finding a consultant because there are conversions issues that she does need to do. Because she thinks his request to put information on disks for future access is relevant, she is going to include that and will get the report for him. This will be done on her terms on her time. The payroll is going live on the new system on January 1, 2005, so it will be soon. As far as meeting her public records obligation, she has done that already. Law Director Dubelko commented that he did not only rely upon comments from Mrs. Copfer when preparing his opinion. He also spoke to the city's IT consultant. The legal opinion indicated that, if a record is kept in a specific medium, the city has an obligation to produce it in that medium. But, if there are additional costs, the records requestor has to pay those additional costs. Clearly the intent of the public records law is to make records more readily available to the public. It was his conclusion that the 10 ~.._.~, ~.... _ . .-~~«.~ ,~.. ~, . :+~a ,:,