Poof! Riverhead disappears Town Board meeting minutes, without public discussion or mention

The public learned recently that Town Board meeting minutes are no longer being transcribed as they have been since the founding of the Town of Riverhead in 1792. 

Minutes are an important resource, valuable for residents tracking issues being discussed in the present day and those looking to them as a historical record. The decision to strip the town’s minutes down to New York State’s bare-bones requirements was made out of public view and, apparently, to save the equivalent of a drop in the bucket in the town’s budget.  

The tradition of verbatim minutes of Town Board meetings in Riverhead goes back almost half a century, to the start of the administration of Supervisor Allen Smith, who took office in January 1976. 

Prior to that, written minutes contained detailed summaries of business transacted, hearings held, including comments made by members of the public, discussions among board members, and general public comments.

And so it was until the beginning of 2024, which opened with newly elected Supervisor Tim Hubbard announcing his would be the most transparent administration in the history of the town.

Ironically, the Jan. 3, 2024 meeting of the Town Board was to be the last for which actual meeting minutes were transcribed.

There was no public discussion of whether the transcription of minutes should be discontinued. There wasn’t even an announcement that the practice would end. We didn’t notice. (Egg on our face.) Thankfully Riverhead resident Cindy Clifford did and asked why the minutes were missing at the July 16 Town Board meeting.

Hubbard asked Town Clerk Jim Wooten, who also took office Jan. 1, to “address” Clifford’s question.

“During the transition I was talking with Diane Wilhelm and she felt — we discussed it — that it was a $20,000 expenditure to have these transcribed, so we’d transcribe them as needed for litigation, otherwise they can if we need to go to the tape and transcribe something, we can do that,” Wooten said by way of “explanation.”

The only things revealed by the official “minutes” posted on the Town Board’s website is whether a resolution passed and how each member voted. Public comments during public hearings? Not reported. Public comments on resolutions? Not reported. Public comments during the open comment period? Not reported. Going by the Riverhead Town Board’s official minutes of their proceedings, you’d never even know the public participated at all, let alone what they had to say. 

This may be some version of utopia for a Town Board uninterested — and even annoyed by — public input. And eliminating public participation and other items from the “minutes” might just work to achieve that utopia, since finding out what’s going on in Town Hall gets harder and harder. Heck, public notices are locked behind the paywall on the website of the “official newspaper.” And published notices no longer contain the actual text of the code being proposed, adopted or amended. Instead, interested persons are directed to go to the agenda of a prior meeting to find the resolution authorizing the publication of the notice of hearing, where they can find the text. Talk about barriers to public participation. 

The notion that residents should go to a video posted on the town’s website to find out what happened is completely ridiculous. The videos themselves cannot be searched. In fact, they don’t even have controls that allow users to fast forward in pre-set increments. They are not accompanied by meeting agendas, so someone looking for a particular hearing, discussion or action has no idea where in the video to attempt a search for it — unless they first go to the agendas and minutes which are available on a completely different website and download the agenda for their reference while searching the video.

You’d have to try real hard to make this any more complicated and less user-friendly than it is. 

And this is just plain wrong — even if the current supervisor hadn’t pledged greater transparency.

Sadly, however, it is not illegal. The New York State Open Meetings Law — a statute inadequate in so many ways for protecting the public’s right to know— simply requires that minutes of all open meetings “consist of a record or summary of all motions, proposals, resolutions and any other matter formally voted upon and the vote thereon.” 

The “minutes” generated by the Granicus platform in use by the Riverhead Town Clerk since July 2018 provide, by default, exactly that: result, mover, seconder, ayes and nays.

Looking at the Granicus-generated minutes of the most recent Town Board meeting, then, you will see that there is no record of any of the five public hearings that were held that day. Numerous residents shared their opinions on a special permit application for an office building on Main Road in Aquebogue. Several others spoke out on a proposed two-family dwelling in Calverton. Others offered comments on a proposed warehouse inside the EPCAL industrial complex. Attorneys and consultants for the applicants gave explanations and clarification during these hearings concerning the proposals. You’d never know any of this from the Town Board’s “minutes.”

Mind you, the Granicus platform provides a simple way to add comments and discussion to the record of proceedings — as Riverhead had done from July 2018 through Jan. 3, 2024. The current town clerk, with the apparent assent of the Town Board, has simply decided to discontinue doing so, supposedly to save $20,000.

Let’s look at that for a moment. The budget line for stenographic services in the town clerk’s budget for the 2024 fiscal year is $10,000— the same amount it was in fiscal year 2023. In 2022 the actual expenditure in that budget line was $11,817.50. In the entire town budget, the only other expenditures for stenographic services appear in the budget for the planning department ($20,000) and justice court ($95,000.) 

We’re not sure whether or when the town clerk began relying on an outside stenographic service for meeting minutes. The minutes used to be produced by a member of the town clerk’s staff.

Maybe if the Town Board had an actual public discussion of this issue at a work session, we’d know more about how the transcripts have been produced and at what expense. Unfortunately, though, Town Board discussions increasingly take place outside of public meetings nowadays — even when decisions get made, as this one apparently did, “offline.” And there certainly is no record of those discussions.

But here’s where all this leaves us.

Let’s say you want to find out the meeting date when a particular matter had a public hearing, so you can then attempt to find that hearing in the video for that meeting and listen to what was said. Don’t try a Google search, because the town’s post-2018 documents don’t show up there. Neither do the videos.

The videos are hosted on two other websites, neither of which is owned or controlled by the town. The town’s videos from 2017 through Oct. 3, 2023 are  hosted on one, and videos after Oct. 3 are hosted someplace else. More on that later.

The town’s agendas, resolutions and “minutes” since 2019 have been hosted on yet another website: one produced by a company named Granicus on its website with the user-friendly name http://riverheadny.iqm2.com/Citizens/Calendar.aspx. 

Nothing on that website turns up in a Google search, including a Google advanced search. Any terms you search on the iqm2 site produce the same result: “your search … did not match any documents.”

You must search instead at the Granicus website itself. The search tool there is clunky at best. Think of something and try it yourself.

Take, for example, the hearing on the special permit for a proposed medical office building on Main Road. (Pretend you don’t already know — because you read about it here — the date of the hearing.) You have to decide what terms to search. Search “main road medical office building.” You get 244 results, displayed in what looks to be totally random order. They’re not presented or ranked according to relevance, the way Google search results are. Nope. Results with highlighted search terms “Main Road” and “office” and “building” are jumbled together without perceptible order. For example, the top result for us was a 2023 resolution approving a special permit for a (different) medical office building, followed by a 2021 denial of a special permit for another building. (Neither of those links produced a document, by the way. Instead we got an “access denied” message underneath a password-protected meeting portal sign-in.) 

The third result was for the same 2021 permit denial resolution (which for some reason did display when we clicked the link.) Other results included links that downloaded and opened large PDF documents without notice or request for permission. These had nothing whatsoever to do with the Main Road medical office building we were searching for. One was an engineering study and report for the construction of a new water storage tank in Wading River. Another was the request for qualifications issued by the town in March 2021 for the “Railroad Street TOD Redevelopment.”

The topic you’re looking for information about doesn’t appear anywhere on the first page of results, which contains 20 items.

We could go on — we could describe what happens when you happen to notice an “advanced search” option but suffice to say, it ain’t what you think. You get the idea. The thing is completely useless.

At this point, any reasonable person would likely give up. Without knowing the date of the hearing up front, you’re pretty much sunk.

The good news is, if you’re really determined, you can call the town clerk’s office and speak to any of the very helpful staff members there, who try to do everything they can to help. We speak from experience. They’ll likely be able to tell you the date of the hearing, assuming it was fairly recent. If it wasn’t recent, and took place since 2019, well, lots of luck.

But armed with the date of the hearing you’d like to watch, you might be able to find the video. First, you have to know that the link on the town’s homepage is labeled “Channel 22” — not “meeting videos” or something that might make sense to the ever-growing portion of the population that watches TV in some way other than an Optimum subscription. (Channel 22 is the Optimum government access channel, provided pursuant to the cable company’s contract with the town.) If you figure that out, you get to a page titled “Channel 22 Schedule” where you are presented with two links (neither of which sounds like a schedule.) One is “Live Stream Video Channel – for meetings held at 4 West Second Street” and the other is “Live Stream Video Channel – for meetings held at 200 Howell Avenue.” 

Let’s say you’re a real novice at the investigative work required to be an informed citizen in Riverhead Town. Or maybe you’re new to town and you don’t know that these addresses are the locations of the “new” Town Hall and the “old” Town Hall. In that case, you also don’t know when Town Hall moved. So it’s time for more searching.

At some point, you click on the 4 West Second Street link and BOOM! There’s the Town Board Meeting July 16 video. You’ve finally hit the jackpot. Until you click on that video link and find the video is nearly four hours long, and the meeting agenda appears under it in one run-on sentence with no line breaks. And, in the final adding-insult-to-injury slap in your face, you find that the video lacks any controls for your use to move forward in 30-second increments. (It has one control that allows you to reverse in 10-second increments.) This makes it damned near impossible to find what you’ve come for, if you happen to have the persistence necessary to get you here to begin with.

So, Mr. Wooten and Town Board accomplices, spare us all the “you can just watch the video” stuff as if this “system” of yours replaces written, searchable minutes. It most emphatically does not.

How do we know either one of these video hosting companies are going to be in business for posterity. Answer: we just don’t. A tech giant like Google’s YouTube may have been a better bet. 

We are also told the town makes copies of every video on DVDs, so don’t worry. That supposes that in 100 or 50 or even 15 years from now, DVDs and DVD players will even exist. Streaming has already replaced DVDs and DVD players are already hard to come by. (Just imagine if the town decided to replace written minutes with videos on VHS tapes some decades ago.) Is this really a good plan for citizen access to public records? We think not. 

Written minutes must not be dispensed with the way this town clerk and this Town Board have quietly decided to dispense with them. A few thousand dollars in the town’s eight-figure annual operating budget is practically a rounding error.

Which brings us to our final point. There are numerous options for AI transcriptions of audio recordings (which transcribe audio from video too.) They are very affordable and the technology is constantly improving. The transcription will require some editing but that can be accomplished without a stenographer or even a practiced typist. Any one of these platforms can serve the town’s purposes for regular meetings. No stenographer required. The cost of deploying modern technology to achieve this function would be less than a rounding error.

The Town Board must take the long view here. Even if providing reasonable access for citizens is not your priority as a Town Board — which it ought to be — what about the town’s historical record? Minutes are often the only source of information for researchers — including town officials looking to understand the past in order to govern in the present and plan for the future. 

We know we have relied on being able to search and read past meeting minutes to better understand why decisions were made or not made. 

So, for the sake of the town’s future historians, journalists, board members, civic leaders and the citizenry it serves, the Town Board must bring back this important resource. As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” 

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