By: Diane Benjamin
Both Bloomington and Normal held meetings last night. Both attempted to use “conferencing”. Some elected officials were in the council chambers, others were on the phone or computer.
Both attempts proved government incompetence.
Government should be the very best possible performing essential services. When government expands their role “for the people” it is always a disaster. Last night was one of those easy to see moments of failure. Evidently testing the systems to work out bugs didn’t happen in either city. If the two meetings had been held in the private sector, people would be unemployed today. I guarantee nobody in government got canned.
The same incompetence is seen across government when they attempt development and entertainment. I bet you can make a long list of blunders by both Bloomington and Normal when they tried. If government can’t be trusted to get common technology right, what do you trust them with?
Bloomington held a Township meeting prior to what was supposed to be a Council meeting. The regular meeting was cancelled because of the technical difficulties during the township meeting. Bloomington has deleted the township video, that’s sad because not only would you have heard Jenn Carrillo wanting the State rules for township aid changed, you would have heard Scott Black say “We can’t do business like this” after the meeting adjourned.
The regular meeting will be rescheduled, since the Open Meeting Act requires 48 hours notice it will probably be Thursday – if they can figure out how to use technology by then.
The technology in Normal took some time to work out bugs, eventually the audio got better. At times it still sounded like the speaker was under water. Stan Nord called in by phone, everyone else used some kind of video chat.
What did the media miss?
Kevin McCarthy must be trying out to be the next mayor. Chris Koos was primed to throw the “remove Section 11” ball to him, he ran with it. Instead of this being a victory for citizens, removing Section 11 from the ordinance is meaningless.
One has to wonder why that section was in the ordinance in the first place. Section 11 merely references Section 25.2-12 of the Municipal Code. Nobody would have known about that code if the ordinance hadn’t referenced it. If one wanted to look for emergency powers, would they look here? http://normal.org/101/Municipal-Code
Nothing the Normal Town Council did last night removes the offensive language from the City Code. Mayor Koos still has the authority to:
Was reference to this in the Ordinance just to make people aware Koos has this power – in case he wants to use it?
The citizens were played, you didn’t get a victory last night.
Kevin McCarthy read a long list of Public Comment emails. If you want to hear them, listen at 8:30. Normal made the right decision not voting for Koos buddy Dave Shields. I believe his was the only comment supporting the ordinance as written. If you missed this in a previous story, McCarthy also read a comment not germane to the agenda. He just changed the rules for Public Comment without a vote.
More evidence that the local political class can not manage a one car funeral. I thought BLM made a vast improvement with their new City Manager, but he was liberally spattered with public mud for assuming staff had the capabilities of setting up a conference call. Conference calls have been around for at least 30 years. Maybe the political class could crawl out from under their 19 century cow chip and join the rest of the public in the 21st century. The only aspect taxpayers know for sure is the political class will throw money at this issue and it still won’t work. Like I said, they can’t manage a one car funeral.
Be careful what you wish for. Next thing you will see is a tax increase justified by the need to upgrade the technology.
The video failure is not surprising. Liberal constantly fail to test. They put too much faith in theory vs reality. Even a novice IT person knows TESTING IS MANDATORY!!! Just look at the Iowa primary counting fiasco to see the pattern of blind trust by liberals. This illustrates why they don’t trust the free market system, they can’t predict or control it.
I don’t buy the powers for Koos are still granted. That was the whole point of removing that section. GLT, Pantagraph, and 92.9 all reported they were removed. If Koos and Pam are all powerful, then Normal just openly lied to the public and press. I don’t believe everything coming out of the mouth of Normal, but this was too big a deal to think a power grab happened after all the uproar.
Read the Town Code, it’s still right there – since 1969. Media is easy to fool since reporters don’t exist anymore.
SMART people DO NOT have to read the instructions! Don’t you know that?
The “professional” staff can’t seem to manage a simple teleconference line, but we should trust them to centrally plan, develop, and manage the local economy, including a portfolio of (taxpayer-funded) real estate holdings and (taxpayer-funded) economic incentives given to those they, in their infinite wisdom, deem to be the “right fit”. Truly amazing!
AFTER reading BN DESERVES BETTER, I came to the real conclusion that MAD MAGAZINE was run better then EITHER Bloomington OR uptown..
We do NEED COMPETENT leadership in BOTH towns from the MANAGER on DOWN and IF it takes several elections, it WILL be worth it. SO, start voting out the incompetent people ASAP!
ASK yourself this.. IF this Corona 19 thing was as BAD as the PLAGUE in the MIDDLE AGES, would YOU trust these folks to be in CHARGE???
Tech issues recently reported on in Normal
– Trackit software the town spent hundreds of thousands on.
– Several recent council meetings missing sound
– several recent meetings with video / had to borrow a reporters recording
– simple video conference
We have done video conferencing for nearly 2 decades at work. Teleconferencing for longer. This is not remotely new tech.
They wonder why we don’t trust them to do smart cities, uptown spending or with absolute power. They constantly overreach and tout how smart they are – we don’t want the smartest town staff money can buy. We don’t want bleeding edge tech. We don’t want Downtown destroyed with Uppity Town. We just want our roads fixed and not have our money pissed away.