Township supervisors discuss the fate of audio records from past Board meetings
By P.J. D’Annunzio, Staff Writer, The Times
NEW GARDEN — What started as an aid to a new township secretary will now serve as a full audio archive of the township’s Board of Supervisors, after the board voted last week to formally change a policy that previously directed the recordings of board meeting to be erased.
Township officials said that the recording of meetings started to aid a new secretary in documenting the meeting minutes. Shortly thereafter, a resolution was passed (Resolution 639) to mandate deletion all audio recordings after they had been reviewed and transcribed by the secretary. Township officials, though, say they not kept up with the mandate of the resolution and recordings dating back to 2010 remain. The board continues to record current meetings.
“When we had a discussion a few weeks ago the majority felt that the purpose, the intent behind the recordings was to keep them for posterity,” Supervisor Bob Norris said. “If that’s the case I certainly support keeping the old ones as well as the new ones…those are public records, if you have them, then you have to share them.”
Supervisor Robert Perrotti, however, spoke against the majority’s sentiment, stating that the board should abide by the letter of the resolution it had previously passed and delete the audio recordings.
At that point Norris proposed that an amendment to Resolution 639 be made, since the board had ignored following it since its inception. Norris’s amendment included the preservation of recordings of past meetings as well as those yet to be recorded.
“I would make a motion that the board acknowledges that its prior resolution policy to destroy electronic records of Board of Supervisor minutes after a written version has been approved was not followed…and that this board at this time should retrospectively retain those prior recordings as well as all recordings going forward,” he said. “I motion that the prior resolution be reversed.”
The supervisors discussed additional provisions for the amendment including the retention time of the recordings—which was determined as indefinitely—as well as the speed at which they would be made available to the public, possibly within five days of the meeting.
Perrotti reiterated his point, defending the original resolution.
“[The recordings] were just an aid for the secretary to do the minutes,” he said. “We had a new secretary and we had just hired an interim township manager who recommended that we tape the minutes so that it would be an aid for her to draft the minutes, but part of that resolution was that after the minutes were adopted, those tapes would be destroyed. So we have a resolution that says one thing, and we should abide by that resolution. My feeling is that this township did not do that.”
After Perrotti’s objection, the Board voted in favor of adopting the amendment to Resolution 639, allowing the recordings from two years ago, as well as future recordings of Board of Supervisor’s meetings to be preserved.
