Forty-One People Watched the Meeting Where the Fee Changed

The video of the March 4 city council meeting has forty-one views. I am responsible for nine of them.

It runs three hours and eleven minutes. The audio comes off a ceiling microphone. For the first forty minutes the camera points at an empty lectern while the board moves through consent-agenda items by number, without reading aloud what the numbers are.

At 1:47:30 the council votes four to three to change how the city assesses stormwater fees on parcels over an acre. That is a real story. It moves roughly $1.4 million a year off commercial property and onto everybody else. I found it because I was being paid to look, and it still took most of a morning.

The paper that used to send someone to that meeting closed its city desk in 2019. The city responded by putting the meetings on YouTube, which satisfies the state open-meetings law within forty-eight hours and costs almost nothing. Everyone involved called it an improvement in transparency. I have not found anyone willing to say out loud that it is not.

So I will. The livestream is not coverage. It is the appearance of coverage, and it serves the council considerably better than the reporter ever did.

Consider what a raw feed actually does. It moves the entire cost of finding the story off the institution and onto the citizen. Three hours of unindexed video is not information. It is the material from which information could be made, by somebody with a morning to spend. There are perhaps four people in this city with that morning, and three of us are paid by somebody.

The old arrangement was a subsidy. One person sat through the three hours so that thirty thousand did not have to, and the four hundred words that ran the next day were the compressed, checkable, arguable version. The compression was the product. Access was never the hard part. The meetings were always public.

I want to give the other side its due, because I have heard it from people I respect. The raw feed has no editor. Nobody decides in advance what counted. If the reporter in 2011 thought a stormwater item was boring, it did not exist — and now it does, permanently, timestamped, unmediated, available to anyone who comes looking in ten years. That is a genuine gain and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But it is a gain in availability, and what collapsed was attention. Those are different resources and one does not substitute for the other. A public record nobody reads has the civic function of a locked cabinet with the key taped to the door.

Here is the exchange that settled it for me. I asked the city clerk whether anyone had ever requested a transcript. She said no, not once since 2019. Then she added, cheerfully, that the videos had reduced her office's workload, because the records requests had stopped coming.

They stopped coming because the people who used to make them worked for the paper.

Forty-one views. The stormwater change takes effect in January. My four hundred words will run, and they will be the only account of that vote that a person could read in the time a person has. When I stop doing this the video will still be up there, complete and unwatched, and somebody will keep calling it transparency.