Whatcom Watch Readers:
We believe that a healthy democracy requires citizens to have meaningful information on decisions by elected officials.
In the February, 2019 issue, page 2, a table with the title “Votes by Elected Officials Pass 12,000 Mark” documents the history of Whatcom Watch’s meeting coverage for local elected bodies. Over 20 years, starting in 1999, our contributors have reported on 4,667 Whatcom County Council votes at 428 meetings.
Readers will note that this issue lacks a Whatcom County Council voting reports from the January 15 and 29, 2019 meetings. This results from accessibility issues Watch contributors experienced accessing information in the new Legislative Information Center (LIC), a feature of the county’s website re-design. In the interest of fairness, the LIC does contain a User Guide tab where a user can access a rather dense guide.
In the past, collecting information on votes has been easy. All of the information was in one location. At the new site, the information is in different locations making assembling the material challenging.
If you have an interest in preserving transparency in local government, please take a few minutes and peruse the Whatcom County Legislative Information Center at http://whatcomcounty.us/2832/Using-the-Legislative-Information-Center. If you find the site difficult to navigate, please consider sending an email to your council member about the issue.
