Agenda, other information missing from website
Springfield City Clerk Frank Lesko has failed to post information about city council business on the city’s website that had been posted under his predecessor.
The law requires public bodies that maintain their own websites to post agendas of meetings on the Internet. The city clerk’s office had traditionally posted agendas more than 72 hours in advance of council meetings, but the city didn’t post the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting until Monday afternoon, when Illinois Times brought the issue to the attention of Mayor Jim Langfelder and City Clerk Frank Lesko.
State law requires that agendas be made public at least 48 hours before meetings. Corporation Counsel Jim Zerkle said that state law allowed for the council meeting to proceed, given that the city clerk posted a paper copy of the agenda inside city hall on the Friday before the council meeting. Nonetheless, he said that the city should be posting agendas on its website.
“The practice of posting (on the website) is good because so many people rely on the Internet,” Zerkle said.
Lesko blamed a computer glitch for the lack of an agenda on the city’s website until the day before the meeting. The city, he said, is in the midst of improving the website and the agenda somehow did not appear.
“We’re taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” Lesko said. “We’re in the midst of a transition right now. We’re opening up a whole new website, one that is going to be more user-friendly, one that is going to have more information on it.”
The agenda for tomorrow’s meeting wasn’t the only thing missing from the city clerk’s portion of the city’s website, where the council’s agendas, minutes, ordinances scheduled for consideration, audio recordings of meetings and other official records have historically been posted.
As of Monday night, the council calendar, which provides a schedule of council meetings, hasn’t been updated since September, although that information can be found on a different part of the city clerk’s portion of the city’s website. Minutes of council meetings hadn’t been posted since Oct. 20. There were no postings of summaries of council meetings or lists of ordinances passed since Oct. 6. The full text of proposed ordinances considered by the council’s committee of the whole hadn’t been posted since May, shortly after Lesko, a former council member, was elected to the city’s clerk post.
Lesko blamed computer glitches for the lack of current information on the city council’s activities. Asked about texts of proposed legislation that stopped appearing alongside agendas of council committee meetings more than five months ago, Lesko said that publishing the texts of legislation under committee consideration was confusing to some people, so the practice was stopped.
In an initial interview, Lesko said that he had met with Langfelder about improving the city website. In an initial interview, Langfelder said that Lesko has met with him, but that didn’t excuse the failure to post an agenda.
“You still have to do the basics,” Langfelder said. “That’s what this is.”
In a subsequent conference call with both Langfelder and Lesko on the line, the mayor said that the clerk was working to upload data onto the website but was not successful.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t go live, as you have discovered,” Langfelder said. “For some reason, there’s a disconnect.”
Who’s to blame? “Well, it’s a glitch in the system,” Lesko answered. “I don’t know if you want to blame it on the computer system.”
“As far as the ultimate responsibility, it falls under the clerk,” the mayor responded. “We have to have a process in place to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
Cecilia Tumulty, Lesko’s predecessor in the city clerk’s office, said that posting council agendas and other council records was a top priority for her.
“That was a campaign promise that I made 12 years ago and I wanted to make sure I lived up to those promises,” Tumulty said. “That is the number one responsibility of the city clerk, making sure that the records are available when you say they’re available and when the law indicates they have to be available. … We had set a bar with this website. Getting information out to the public was just as important as getting it out to elected officials, if not more important. If that information isn’t available to the public, who’s to say what type of an ordinance or resolution can just get blown by the public, especially if you’re not getting it posted on the website.”
Langfelder and Lesko vowed to improve the city’s website to make it more userfriendly. Among other things, Langfelder said, the city should reserve a spot on the home page for the city council. As it stands now, the public must click on the city clerk’s portion of the website to find out what the council has done and what it might do in the future.
“What we really should do is put a link (to the council) right on the front page,” Langfelder said.
