Power to the people is the theory of Democracy. When a majority of people want something, they should get it because they are the largest group with that opinion. In our country, the Government was created with built in mechanisms for compromise. It encompassed the idea that a majority would work together with a minority to accomplish goals. Positions would shift from time to time, and everyone would play along because one day you might be in the majority and then the next day you might be the minority. The rules of Democracy in the United States of America were designed like traffic laws. People may disagree about issues, but we all agree which side of the road to drive on and that a red traffic light means stop. Our society and government has been founded with this idea of compromise between groups of people who can't always have it their way.
Or is it?
This is where an argument has started lately. Is it right for the biggest, loudest group in the room to get their way? Are they they "majority"? What is "fair representation"? What are the "rules for voting"? What if the vote is "rigged"? Many disagreements occur today on all these topics. We certainly don't have all the answers.
MAJORITY RULES
If a time and place for all to assemble and speak their desires is formally announced and everyone is given a voice or vote, then this in theory represents the rule of a Democracy. Those who are involved clearly represent the public, and the public gets to decide. Representatives have the job of carrying out what the public wants. Government should work out the "rough spots" and work to reach a compromise between people with different opinions to get things done.
MINORITY RIGHTS
What if some are unrepresented by apathy or lack of interest? What if some have an agenda and can "pack the room"? What if the public is uninformed? What is the duty of the people's elected representatives at this point? Do officials get to unilaterally decide what is the best for "the good of all the people"? Or does a representative just do what the loudest voices in the room say to to do? It is much harder to be a leader when everyone wants their way and there there is no compromise. Many leaders simply support the loudest voices in the room. It's the easy answer and perhaps the correct one. Maybe the result is a large number of unhappy people.
I am entirely persuaded that the agitations of the public mind advance its powers, and that at every vibration between the points of liberty and despotism, something will be gained for the former. As men become better informed, their rulers must respect them the more. -- Thomas Jefferson - 1802
Or perhaps it's easier in modern English:
I'm totally convinced that things that piss people off make them more powerful, and every time when there is a disagreement between freedom and oppression, freedom will win. As men are better informed their rulers must respect them more.
So in the interest of freedom, we're going to try to help you be better informed to be intelligently pissed off and therefore more powerful.
Sound OK with you?
Say you want a revolution We better get on right away Well you get on your feet And into the street
Singing power to the people Power to the people Power to the people Power to the people, right on
By enlarge, the majority of the people of Rush do not "have the power". The power is in hands of a minority who actively participate. By participating they become the majority. No one knows what the real majority wants. The majority don't vote and the majority doesn't show up at town meetings. So the "loudest voices in the room" who are an organized minority get what they want because they have become the majority. By the rules, this is how Democracy works. Don't like it? Show up and represent your opinion!
As Thomas Jefferson said above, "As men become better informed, their rulers must respect them the more." Rush tries to make people better informed but in our opinion, it falls short of that goal. Town Government by law is to be transparent of its activities, but the letter of the law and an actual application are not always the same thing.
What's a Rush Town Government Body?
These are the people you elected to represent you in Rush. They in turn appoint involved citizens to other Town Boards or Committees to provide insight or "checks and balances" of power. The idea is that there are several steps to determining laws and directives concerning the good of all the people in a democratic way.
The highest legislative authority in Rush is the Town Board. Read their web page to understand who they are and how they got there.
The Town Board appoints people to the Planning, Conservation and Zoning Boards and determines the Town Budget. Basically, any change has to make it past these people before anything happens.
The Town Clerk "does the paperwork" and more. Read about this job here.
Read all about the other boards and committees off the Town Website.
New York State Open Meetings Law
You can read the whole law here, but the idea is:
The time and place of every scheduled meeting of a Town Government Body needs to be given to the news media and posted in public places where people can see the announcement at least 72 hours (3 days) before the meeting.
Unscheduled meetings also need to be posted, but there is no specified "lead time". It just needs to be posted, "a reasonable time" before the meeting.
If the Town can, a meeting notice should be posted on the Town website.
Every meeting of a Town Government Body has to be open to the public at an inclusive public place so anyone can attend.
Public meetings can go into "Executive Session" which excludes the public for certain provisions.
If a meeting uses videoconferencing then it needs to be available to the public. The details on how to connect to a live broadcast of the meeting needs to be provided to the public.
Any records or documents shown at a public meeting needs to be made available to the public.
Any law or rule or legislation that is scheduled to be discussed at a public meeting needs to be posted on the Town Website at least 24 hours before the meeting.
If practical, meetings should be broadcasted to the public and then the recording posted on the site.
Minutes need to be taken at all meetings. For the parts of a meeting that are public, they have to be available on the Town Website within two weeks of the meeting. For the Executive Session parts, there just needs to be recording of a summary and a decision of any final action (protecting any sensitive information as defined in the law.) Executive Session minutes are to be made available within one week of a meeting where one occurred.
If there is an unedited video recording of a meeting, it counts as minutes.
If anyone feels this law has been violated, then they can sue the Town. If they win, the Town Government officials that violated the law need to go to training, or possibly the court could reverse an action taken by Town Government which violated the law.
And Then COVID Hit
On March 12, 2020 Governor Cuomo suspended the "in person" part and allowed meetings to take place virtually. For Rush, this was a big step because the Town hadn't been videoconferencing meetings before. The first televised meeting of town business was done on March 25, 2020 (and no recording of it is available as it was just a finance meeting of the Rush Town Board). With group gathering suspended, most all Town business was conducted on Zoom. Many recordings are available on the Town's YouTube Chanel. The "in person" requirement came back on June 21, 2020 when the emergency suspension ended, but on September 2, 2021 Governor Hochul signed legislation to extend the provision and that ended on January 15, 2022. But the good news is that the recording of Town Government continues. Power to the people! (Right on!)
What Rush Town Government Gets Right
The Town of Rush has a website that was recently redesigned. The vendor that was picked to build it was chosen primarily because the company uses a little snippet of code from this company that makes the site easier to use for the handicapped. The Town website site has lots of information and the Open Meetings Law is followed (for the most part).
Some Town Meetings have been cancelled when it was determined that they were not announced enough ahead of time. As stated in the "Open Meetings Law" the Town has to give notice of public meetings in the press. Since the notices are not "News" and reported for free, the Town needs to pay for their publication. This means deadlines and a wait for publication and distribution. Without a newspaper in Rush, the job for printing Rush Town notices in fell to the "POST" for years. The "POST" was the remnant of the former "Henrietta Post" which was part of a string of newspapers in the Rochester suburbs owned by the Wolfe Community Newspaper group. These papers were popular from the 1950's until the 1990's.
Starting in the 1990's newspaper consolidation began, and the "Henrietta" part was dropped as Brighton, Pittsford and Henrietta (who each had a "Post") were merged into a single "POST" without the town name. With newspaper subscriptions dwindling and advertisement revenue dropping, the "POST" finally ceased publication in 2021. The Town of Rush was one of it's last advertisers. The "POST" subscription was obviously too low for it to survive, which means that the intent of the Open Meetings Law to inform the public was not very effective. Nobody was reading it. The Town of Rush has since started printing official Town Notices in the Mendon/Honeoye Falls/Lima Sentinel newspaper.
If the law of publishing meeting notices in a newspaper is meaningless because nobody buys newspapers any more, is it in the Town's interest to do something different? Or will the lawyers just say that the Town must only follow the letter of the law? Since there isn't a law saying that the Town of Rush has to have a Facebook page or a Twitter account, or some other presence to draw a bigger crowd to meetings, the Town of Rush doesn't have one and they don't bother doing it.
The Town Clerk and their staff do a superb job of producing accurate minutes of every Town Government Body. The Town website has the ability to send e-mail notices of updates if you subscribe. There are several types of notices you can get. Helpful links at the bottom of all the pages takes you to agendas and minutes of most of all the Town Government Bodies. There is a newsletter that the town publishes bi-monthly and mails to the town. The most recent one is at linked at the bottom of every page. It's a good faith effort to follow the law and try to give information to the people.
Where Rush Town Government Falls Short
There just isn't enough labor to do all the things the best way, and the tools and talent are not available to do everything. There are just not enough resources. We've been signed up to get all the notices from the Town via the website for months. We just get the "New Legal Notices" that looks like this and something called "E-News" that looks like this.
If you get the an e-mail, and there is a notice for you to read you click the "Download" link. It opens the message in a web page and then a file (usually a PDF) is downloaded to your machine. Sometimes it might be a Microsoft Word document. Then you have to click on it to start a program that opens the file. Considering the website was primarily built for the handicapped in mind, this is a complicated process for even able bodied people. Try doing this on a phone, where more than half of all people get their e-mail. It's annoying and cumbersome and doesn't make it easy for people to get information. This "download and open in another program" process is true of every single document linked on the entire Town of Rush website.
Here's what it is like to open a notice with an attachment on a phone:
Rush has minutes and agendas and videos of past meetings all linked to its website, but they are "all over the place". Town Government Body meetings are not really on the Town Website. They are listed on a different website from a company called General Code that has the resources to archive and document the Town Laws. Here is the ECODE360 page for the Town of Rush. If you go to the Agendas and Minutes page of the Town of Rush Website, you can see the archives of the town up to 2018, but after that you can go here for agendas and here for minutes. Except if you want to see the agendas and meetings about the ongoing update to the Town Comprehensive plan. Then you need to go to the Document Center on the Town Website.
Is your head spinning yet?
But Wait! There's More!
With the Town starting Zoom meetings using video teleconferencing, there is now a YouTube channel where the recorded meetings are archived. On YouTube, as on the document listing pages, the file are named strangely. Some are missing dates. Minutes of meetings are sometimes in the wrong year. Sometimes the resolutions and documents presented in meetings are not available on the website. There are scattered test videos and things laying around. There isn't the time or staff to curate all this information. The disorganization isn't intentional or fraudulent. It is just sloppy. It's a good faith effort, but if a person is looking for facts in history, or is trying to see information in a timeline to see how an issue progresses, they are going to be as frustrated as we are trying to figure stuff out.
Here at The Echo, we are not just bitching about it. We're doing something. We are curious about what's going on in Rush Town Government, and the first step is to read all the minutes and watch some of the video of the available meetings. To makes sense of it, we decided to compile everything into a simple calendar which we make available to you:
It's a simple Google Calendar that lets you scroll backwards and forwards and click on the dates and see the meeting minutes or the videos from YouTube. It links to all the content that is scattered around on the Town websites. If a document needed a download or a few extra clicks to open it, we fixed that problem. You can see the calendar in day, week, month or year or agenda view which is a list of everything in date order. It goes back to 2018. Here's another monthly agenda view from the same data in a different format:
The calendar shows past and future events with the Zoom meeting info from the Official Town Calendar, so you can add future meetings to your Google calendar (if you have one.) Most people do if they have a gmail.com email address. Get one if you don't. A Gmail address is free.
We hope it makes you better informed and encourages you to contribute your voice to the conversation. We are not making decisions for anyone. We're just going to call it as we see it and you decide.
We are going to look at several issues that are important to the town, based on the volume and intensity of town meetings from 2018 to the present. All of these meetings are open to the public and are regularly scheduled. You can find the schedule of meetings here on the Town of Rush website. Use them as the definitive source for meeting information.
Most people don't come to town meetings. To be honest, they are usually a colossal bore and a waste of time unless people are pissed off and want to yell at each other. But we have spared you the pain and we have scoured the meeting minutes to do your homework prep for you.
You remember "Cliff's Note's", right? Those thin paperback study guides for when you didn't read the book assignment and there was going to be a test the next day and you had to at least get a C grade? Like that.
We are going to only concentrate on a few issues and give you a synopsis. If you are not sure if we are summarizing correctly, no problem! Go read all the minutes yourself or watch the YouTube replays. Any commentary or analysis we make will be linked to the official documents so you can read them and form your own opinion.
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