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This past week the Westmoreland Board of Supervisors looked at the law and the law won, as the old song goes.
Their meetings are now open to the public and can be videotaped. That’s what the law says and supervisors decided to obey that law. As of this week, all county meetings are being held at A. T. Johnson Community Center and can be videotaped.
Thanks to the efforts of WE COUNT and member Robert Quinn, who showed the county the section of the law that talked about recording public meetings, citizens are going to be able to see board meetings from the comfort of their homes by watching via The Journal’s Web site at www.journalpress.com. Since the board continues, for the most part, to hold these meeting during the day, when people are out and about or at work, having the ability to see the meetings on their computers will bring county government much closer to residents. And now that the county has high-speed Internet available, many residents can get access to the meetings.
When Quinn, who had the law in hand, was recently prohibited from recording a Board of Supervisors meeting in the English building courtroom by Westmoreland Sheriff’s deputies, he had already videotaped a meeting of the Industrial Development Authority in that room and it had been placed on The Journal’s Web site where it received plenty of attention from residents.
OK, so no one wanted to confront the local judge and ask him to make the call whether a courtroom is a courtroom when it is being used for another purpose; changing the meeting location is an easy out to avoid that confrontation. Now, Sheriff’s deputies will have no cause to prohibit video cameras at supervisors’ meetings.
For several months now, The Journal has been taping and video-streaming meetings of the public bodies in Colonial Beach. Surprisingly, when The Journal proposed to videotape meetings in Colonial Beach last spring, officials were receptive. Now, it is routine that meetings of the council, School Board, and Planning Commission are routinely taped and running on our Web site.
The King George Board of Supervisors and School Board have long been recorded and shown on the local cable channel. Those meetings can also now be viewed on The Journal’s website.
While The Journal is not CNN, Fox News, CBS, or any other major TV outlet, the paper is out there trying to make government available to the people. As we watch the national news, we see that people are closely watching the actions of their public officials and demanding that they be heard. We suspect local officials realize that and want to be connected to the voters.
The Journal has no agenda about the direction of government, but we feel strongly that people have plenty of ideas about how they want their government run, and we want to be a part of their efforts.
So, while we have been critical of the Board of Supervisors in the past, this time we have to give them credit for the grace and speed with which they made videotaping a reality in Westmoreland.
Click Here to watch video of the Board's first meeting at A. T. Johnson.
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