The policies of the Board of the GWD need to change to allow public participation and input

By John "Jack" Ruskey

The GWD's current practices deny the public vital information and provides no meaningful way to communicate information to the Board on vital facts or possible consequences of proposed actions.

1. The District's web site should be modified to be more user friendly by providing access to the various studies and records of past significant ordinances passed by the District. As an example, the current web site does not contain any information on the adoption of the medical insurance program which the Board voted itself or a copy of the New Water Service Charge which has stopped the opening of new farms in the last 10 years. To obtain a copy of this information, a customer must file a official legal request with the District for Production of a Public Record and then pay for the copy. Such information should be readily available to everyone on the web site without cost.

2. The District should publish the agenda and materials about its up coming meetings more than 72 hours before the meeting. The short time period of information being available on the web site on Friday for a Tuesday meeting does not allow adequate time for the public to be notified and respond to the proposed actions, many of which are of great public interest and importance. Bert and I would have the agenda and related documents on the website at least a week in advance of all meetings, including meetings of the Board's special committees.

3. The minutes of the Board's meetings would have a more specific reporting of what was discussed and the reasons for the decisions made by the Board. Now the current minutes are completely uninformative to the public who could not attend the meeting. For example, now member of the public speaks on a specific matter and the minutes merely state that such a person spoke. Nothing in the minutes reflects the topic or the substance provided by the public speaker.

4. The retention of all audio tapes of the Board meetings. The District has a practice of taping the Board meeting, but does not tape any committee meetings. There are no minutes kept of the Committee meetings. The Board erases the tape of its meetings as soon as the minutes of the meeting are approved. As soon as I found out about this practice of the destruction of the tapes, I have had to specifically order and pay for the tapes of the meetings. All tapes should be preserved for at least 5 years and certain key meetings should have the tapes kept forever.

The directors should each make his or her email addresses available to the public and have scheduled periodic office hours to meet with concerned customers. All attempted communications from the public is completely screened by the District's staff and there are no direct lines of communications to the members of the Board. Bert and I will give everyone our email addresses and we will establish regularly scheduled office hours to meet with any of the District's customers who have any complaints or input to be considered by the Board. We would encourage the other directors to follow our practices as set forth above. The above will cause the directors to spend additional time in the discharge of their duties, but it will make the Board more responsive to the needs and wishes of the District's customers.