Blog Post < Previous | Next >
MMWD
MMWD must televise board meetings!
The following letter has been sent to the Board of the Marin Municipal Water District.
Dear Marin Municipal Water Directors,
On March 18th I received the following email alert from the Marin Fire Department via Nixle:
Watershed maintenance crews are conducting a controlled burn on West Ridgecrest Boulevard south of the Laurel Dell gate today. Smoke and flame may be visible on Mount Tamalpais. No emergency.
I hadn’t received a notice like this in recent memory, so it raised a number of questions in my mind. Was this a policy shift brought on by the recent fires in Paradise and Santa Rosa? If so, I wondered which board members pushed to allow a controlled burn on Mt Tam. I have also been following the recent announcements about yet another round of rate increases in Marin, with great interest.
In response, I sought answers by visiting the MMWD website, but to my dismay, I found scant information to help me understand how decisions were being made at MMWD Board hearings.
What I discovered is that MMWD does not broadcast and archive videos of meetings, the way most other Marin agency do. In fact, the only shred of evidence that a meeting took place was in the form of some very skeletal minutes. Given the number of controversial issues MMWD is presently dealing with (the rate increases, for one) and our need to do everything we can to prevent a Paradise like fire storm in Marin, I find this truly remarkable.
I can pull up a video of the Fairfax Planning commission debating whether a café should be able to put a table on the sidewalk, but I can’t pull up a video of a MMWD board discussion about how to properly maintain our countywide water supply or how to prevent a wildfire catastrophe. People clearly want to be kept abreast of important issues such as water rates and wild-fire prevention on MMWD lands and need the ability to assess the current opinions of board members.
Unfortunately, due to work and family obligations, most taxpayers can’t often make a second commute to attend MMWD meetings in person. So all we’re left with are snippets of “news” as reported in the Marin IJ, but the IJ reporters more often than not ignore the big picture and the political maneuvering that goes on, as if they are afraid to offend the board.
I ask you to remember that elected MMWD board members have the same fiduciary obligations to the public they serve as other elected officeholders in Marin County. And as such, in this day and age, that demands full transparency, using readily available video and web-based technology.
The importance of implementing this immediately cannot be overstated.
Sincerely,
Charles Cornwell
Fairfax