Rockville Centre Democrats spur county transparency

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A few weeks ago, the Rockville Centre Democratic Club announced that it was hosting transcripts of Nassau County Legislature meetings on its website, making it the only place residents could access that information without having to put in a formal request with the county.

A week or so later, the county acted on its own to make transcripts of its meetings accessible to the public, spurred on by the work of the Democratic Club.

“A lot of people just don’t realize that sort of thing is available,” said Henry Boitel, president of the Democratic Club. “If they did get it, the stuff was not searchable.”

The project started a few months ago when Boitel, realizing that there was a stenographer taking notes at all of the county meetings, inquired to see if there were records. There were, but he had to submit Freedom of Information requests to access them. He and other members of the Democratic Club decided to become a hub for the information. They requested two and a half years worth of transcripts and began uploading them to the Democratic Club’s website.

“We had to go through carefully to make them searchable,” Boitel said. “That took us about a week of work.”

After the club announced the documents were online, Nassau County Legislator Kevan Abrahams (D-Hempstead) proposed a bill that would have the county upload the transcripts to its own website.

“It is the duty of the Legislature to provide access to its own records,” Abrahams said in a release. “It is just irresponsible to point residents to a private party website to get public information. I commend Mr. Boitel for taking the initiative to make this available for Nassau residents but agree it should be a function of the County.”

But before Abrahams’ bill could be brought to the floor, Presiding Officer Norma Gonsalvez (R-East Meadow) directed the Legislature’s clerk to begin posting transcripts to its website, going back nine years.

“This is an instance of Democrats and Republicans cooperating,” Boitel said. “And if they did more of that instead of throwing bricks at each other, we’d get more done.”

Boitel said he is still working on getting the county to make archives of the videos it takes of all the legislative meetings. The videos are streamed live online, but there is no archive of them. He also said that club is going to work on getting the Town of Hempstead to publish its meeting transcripts and try to get it to have live videos and video archives of its proceedings.

“I think it’s a good sign that the grass roots, if it puts it mind to it, can influence the transparency for which public determinations are made,” he said. “This will both make the average person more knowledgeable about what’s going on, and making the people in the legislature more accountable for what they do.”