To the Editor:

Princeton Council has decided, on a trial basis, to “streamline” the way in which sessions are represented in the official minutes (as reported in Town Topics, Sept. 11, “Council Decides to Try Streamlined Minutes”). Minutes will now be limited to a register of Council members’ votes — that’s it. This reduction of the record is most disturbing. I hope the “trial period” does not last long.

Any governmental body must seek accuracy, accountability, and transparency. Council member Pat Simon had it exactly right when he said, “The things we say should be part of the public record, and should be easy to find” (as quoted in the story). Anything less encourages irresponsibility — and has the further negative effect of discouraging citizens from participating in municipal affairs.

Mayor Lempert, unfortunately, bowing to expediency and the acknowledged pressures of consolidation on municipal staff, is quoted as remarking that minutes “should be less of a transcript of what each person has said …. It would be easier to keep them [the minutes] up to date.” She was apparently not alone in her views. But “ease” cannot be the appropriate standard for recording official public sessions.

The idea of using TV30’s videos of each session as a kind of substitute “minutes” beggars the imagination. Anyone who has tried to use those videos in order to learn what a council member actually said (as I have, during the past several years) knows that the sound track is poor, government officials (and municipal staff) don’t speak clearly into the microphone, and a citizen’s labors in transcribing a council member’s statements (let alone a conversation) can take hours. As Mr. Simon rightly notes, the video cannot be searched — by keyword or any other means. TV30 does not provide “the best of both worlds.”

Hopefully, Council will soon devise better and more appropriate means for helping the recording secretaries do their work in a timely manner. The methods proposed for the “trial period” amount to an erasure of language (Council members’ actual views and positions, the nature and context of any given Council discussion, not just the final vote). They court a disaster for democratic transparency.

Let us hope that Mr. Simon and others can persuade his colleagues to return, soon, to acceptable methods that ensure that each elected official can be held accountable for what s/he says.

Daniel A. Harris

Dodds Lane