Did you catch Jill Schramm’s article in the Minot Daily News on Minot’s Disaster Resilience Competition meeting? If not, it’s worth your time to read it and see the projects local leaders are recommending for Minot. The window to complete Minot’s Phase II application is short, so it’s great that we’re organizing quickly to give ourselves time to submit the best application possible.
But here’s the problem. The meeting was yesterday at noon and in attendance were more than 50 stakeholders from various Minot organizations. And all of that took place without an official media notification. Now, not every meeting should be open to every citizen. But when the purpose of a meeting is to discuss how we propose to spend what might amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, don’t you think representatives of the public in the form of media should at least be invited? I do too.
Now, there were a lot of people at the meeting, so nothing about it was a secret. That’s good. But, whatever the reason for this oversight — and I have no doubt that it was just an oversight — it needs to be fixed post haste. Every month in the City Manager’s report to City Council one of the headline priorities is Public Communication and Transparency. It’s time to pay that line more than lip service and ensure we’re actually acting as if it were a priority.
And for those who don’t know, The Minot Voice is Minot’s newest source for news. We’ll do our best to get your news out to a Minot audience if you email us at news @ theminotvoice.com. Or better yet, submit news here or raise a voice of your own so you can reach our audience directly.
