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i’ve missed a few meetings of the emergency communications board, but barry neulen has resigned as director since this january meeting... he had ties to the company he was trying to bully the board into giving $200k for no-bid contract.
had the same thought again today as i walked around to the back of a building and had to ring a buzzer & state my purpose to be let in.
i only knew about today’s meeting because i checked the physical bulletin board at city hall. i can’t find it noticed elsewhere. the city meeting calendar online leaves a lot to be desired. 
they are proposing a change to the meeting minutes from verbatim to action items only. the woman who keeps the minutes says it took her 16 hours to prepare the minutes from the january meeting. i’m struggling to believe that.
charlottesville police chief brackney has questions about the change - will the new minutes have timestamps that make it easy for people to refer back to the recording for more information? (sounds like the answer is this is possible but the secretary is unwilling to commit.)
so, effective with the february meeting, ECC board meeting minutes are action only, rather than verbatim. it’s not clear if the recording referred to is publicly available?
the local 911 dispatch center is still frighteningly short staffed. the training supervisor position is vacant, which seems like a problem for an organization that is on-boarding ten people in the next month.
it sounds like we’ll be at zero vacancies for dispatchers once this new round of hires starts at the end of april, which is good? brackney had asked at a previous meeting how much time existing employees are spending training new employees, but there’s not a clear answer given.
the conference room smells overwhelmingly like a recently microwaved frozen burrito.
allison farole, the emergency management coordinator, has been nominated for the virginia emergency management association’s emergency management professional of the year. aaand now they are going into closed session.
they’ll probably come out of closed session to certify the appointment of the interim director but that’s the only thing left on the agenda and the setting of this meeting leaves nowhere for members of the public to be during the closed session.
public officials talk a lot about how they want better, more meaningful public engagement. one simple step would be to make all public meetings public in actually meaningful ways. better public notice. more accessible locations. easily accessed video/audio recordings.
