You Gotta See It to Believe It

Wednesday night I had to choose between three activities on my calendar. One was recreational, but I was exhausted from the campaign and its culmination so running around was out. One involved poking my head into a scouting meeting, and I figured I could make the tail end of that, but got so caught up in choice three that I never made it to the scout meeting either.

Choice three was to attend the legislature meeting at the County Office Building. Although the thing that drew my attention was an email from Ed Day regarding a proposal he was going to put forth, buy the time I arrived I had missed his proposal and the public comment period.

I can only assume from what I heard from the legislators speaking there must have been many more people present before I arrived. However, I became so intrigued and enthralled with the proceedings that I ended up staying at the meeting until the very end, as did maybe 30 other people. Of those 30, some clearly have ties to various legislators, so the uninvolved, curious public was more likely 20 or so.

In my first paragraph I specifically mentioned where the legislature meets, because I’m pretty sure there are vast numbers of the public that A) have never been to a meeting of this body; and B) don’t even know where it actually meets. I don’t necessarily blame anyone for this - most likely simply due to apathy - but if you want to see your government in action, good or bad, you need to once in a while come to a meeting of the County Legislature.

I will caution you at the outset that often this may be as exiting as watching paint dry, or bread toast. But not everything needs to be exciting to be informative, and watching government work is important if you want to understand the issues that revolve around you as you go about your daily activities. Many folks are quite content to let government do its thing, and could care what is taking place in the political sphere. That is certainly a personal choice that anyone is free to make. I happen to like to be informed about politics, and while I’m not willing to spend my time attending every meeting of the town and local governments, I do attend a few each year, usually because a certain topic piques my interest.

First and foremost, I think we need better access to the various governmental meetings. We have two major cable providers in the town, and they should be required to fill some of the myriad of empty public access channels with video recordings of meetings of the town and county meetings. Just like CSPAN exists because not everyone can get to Washington, D.C. to see our national government in action, the same holds true for local government. I know some of the county meetings are taped, but none in their entirety and they certainly don’t make finding them in the tv listings easy. I looked around the legislature website and couldn’t find anything. A goggle search turned up Cablevision listings but none for FIOS.

What is so important about attending meetings? It depends on how you want to receive your information. You could choose to rely on our local media to be the source of your knowledge. That method is filtered, edited and from a singular point of view of the reporter covering the story, if the story is covered at all. That also doesn’t factor in the bias that many media outlets have.

You could rely on the minutes of the meeting. But transcriptions come with their own limitations. Transcripts can’t convey things such as body language, voice inflections and the like, which can often be as illuminating as the actual words spoken, if not more so. Another issue is that minutes lag behind the actual meeting. For the County, it is approximately 3 meetings or 6 weeks behind. For Clarkstown the Town Board minutes are about 10 weeks behind.

Even the aforementioned video would come with some limitations as well. Have you ever attended a live sporting event, concert or play that was also televised? Or perhaps attended a taping of a TV show? There is so much that goes on at these events, and when you see them live your eyes get to take in what you choose. When you see the televised version you see what the director chooses to show you.

So here I was at the meeting Wednesday night, and the better part of the two hours I spent there was spent listening to legislators debate back and forth over procedural issues about setting public hearings, or whether to allow the County Executive Elect to bring an item to the floor without going through the appropriate committee first. Getting to actually hear the various legislators advocate their point of view, watching their body language, seeing who actually pays attention to what is going on is all very fascinating. You just can’t get this feedback from transcripts alone. You get to watch them spar with one another, even at times rip each other apart, and then hear them say how much they like and admire each other. And sometimes they actually mean that. 

If you want to speak at the public comment portion you get only two minutes to express your thoughts. Not much time, but certainly a good way to symbolically show public sentiment on a topic. Similarly, not everything they vote on makes a difference in real terms, but also expresses symbolism, which may be more important than the actual topic at hand.

No matter what your view on the subjects discussed or the personality of any given legislator or the legislature as a whole, it is empowering to see your government at work. It will give you greater insight when you then read those minutes or news reports about what took place. It will help you be an informed citizen. We need more people to care about what goes on in this county.