Latest / Saluda County Unplugged / Transparency and Communication
Transcript
- Josh Morton: You've probably heard somebody say, just want more transparency from our government. And that's a fair expectation, but what does transparency actually look like? Is it about access to information, better communication, or something else entirely? In this episode, we're breaking that down. What the law requires, how you can actually get information today, and where we know that we can do better. Welcome to this week's episode of Saluda County Unplugged. Well, this is exciting. Our first ever podcast episode. Yes. We're excited to have y'all. Thanks for listening. Yeah. We've been talking about this for a while. You've been talking probably for a year or so about a podcast. And I started talking about doing a podcast. It's like, Hey, why don't we do it? So we went to the county administrator and the incoming county administrator and the county council chairman and all of them agreed. Yes, this is a fantastic idea. And so here we are. and we're excited to be doing it. And our goal here is we really want to help people understand what goes on in local government. And we want to try to find a way to make information. easier to navigate, more accessible, easier to understand. We have a website, we have a Facebook page, and now this podcast is really gonna give us a platform to be able to explain things and not just post them. Yeah, and I think a big thing is a lot of the information that people ask for, it's already there, but even I have trouble finding it sometimes because our stuff is not just very readily accessible to people who... don't know exactly where to go to look for specific things. And we can definitely own up to that. Absolutely. And we recognize that people want more transparency and that is valid. It is important. And so that's what we're here to talk about today. So what exactly is transparency? think it's important that we define that term before we get into the conversation. Transparency is access to information, to meetings, to decisions that have been made. And a lot of this is laid out in the South Carolina Freedom of Information Act. Yeah. Transparency is not just a great idea. It's a legal requirement. That's right. We are legally required to have our meetings be open to the public. We're required to maintain public records and make those records available to the public. And so all of that is really important because we want to make sure information is out there. But again, we're legally required to do these things. And a lot of times when people say that there's a lack of transparency, it's not necessarily a lack of transparency, but a lack of communication. And with this podcast, we're hoping to fill in that communication gap and help our citizens kind of understand that stuff is there. It just might take a little while to find it. Right. And that is something we've committed as we're doing this podcast to educate, not advocate. And part of that means that we're going to own the areas that we can improve. And so when we talk about transparency versus communication, the information may already be out there. It's posted somewhere, it's available in some format, but it's hard to find or it's not explained in enough detail or we haven't done a good job of telling people where to look for that information. And so there's really two different issues that we have here. We have the issue of true transparency and then we have the issue of communication. And so I think it's important that we understand that a lot of these issues aren't so much that there's a lack of transparency, it's that there's a lack of communication. And I think that's a part that we're working really hard right now to try and improve. Because we definitely understand that both of those are frustrating. Yes, absolutely. Transparency really is a shared relationship between the government and the citizens. And so part of this, I would would challenge our citizens as they're talking about the need for greater transparency is a way that you can help with that is to help us identify specific information gaps. If there is an area where you feel like information isn't available, make sure that you identify that and bring it to our attention so that we can fill that gap. Whenever people just say we want greater transparency. it's hard to really understand exactly what it is that you're looking for. So if you can be specific with that request, that helps us a lot in improving what we're doing. And a big part of this conversation is about us being honest with areas that the county can improve with communication. And that's what we're going to be talking about here in just a second. We understand that our website is difficult to navigate. I know I have a lot of trouble navigating it from time to time and finding the things that I'm looking for quickly. And we know that and we're working to fix it. One of the big problems that we have is we are a smaller county with limited resources. And so we don't have as much money to throw into a website as some other counties, other entities. Actually, the website that we have now is it's a free website that's hosted by the state on one of their platforms. And we're hoping in the near future to move to something better. We are looking into that and we've actually already got bids to do that. But part of that is that there will be costs associated with that. But we are working through it because we recognize that that is a really important thing for us to We are committed to improving transparency and communication because we want information to be accessible. We want it to be easy to understand. And it's actually why we started this podcast is because we wanted to have an opportunity to break things down and to offer additional information and explanations. And I think as we get into future episodes where we're talking about County council decisions and upcoming agenda items and things like that, I think you're going to see that we're able in this. platform to be able to really break some of that down in ways that hasn't been done before. Yeah, there are a lot of things on our site that people don't even know are on our site. I just found out not too long ago that our ordinances are on our website. It just takes a little while to dig through and find them. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I think that's where we should go next is let's walk our listeners through how they can actually get some of the information that they're looking for. If you go to our website, saluda county dot sc dot gov, it will take you to a landing page and it'll have some pretty pictures of the county pulled up and there'll be a lot of things that you see that are probably not what you're looking for. However, let's say we're trying to find the agenda for the upcoming meeting. We have one in a couple of weeks and we want people to be able to look and see what's going to be talked about. So if you look on our homepage under recent news, there will be a link. to the upcoming agenda and then after a council meeting the following month the minutes are posted and the minutes sum up what was talked about and voted on at prior meeting. Right and it's important to know that those minutes run about a month behind and the reason for that is that the minutes have to be approved before they're published. So at the March county council meeting for example they approve the February minutes. So the February minutes will be what's on there after the March meeting. And that's just in place so that we can keep an accurate record of what was voted on at the prior meeting. So if we were to go find the minutes for our last meeting, we would hover over County Council. There are four tabs. And then when that drops down, you have it separated out by year. You click on the year you're looking for, scroll down and it's separated out by month. And then you just click on the link and it will pull up the meeting, the meeting minutes in a PDF format. Right. If you're, if you want to stay ahead of what's being discussed by the council, you check the agenda and that agenda comes out several days before the council meeting. It isn't published until it's finalized, but it is out ahead of the meeting. And then if you want to see the decisions that were made, that's going back and looking at the minutes. But there's also lot more information that's available on the website besides the County Council agendas and minutes. And so if you're on the website, if you will go to the services tab, that's where you'll find a lot of other information that's available to you. Information that's available in a searchable format. So you can find property records, tax records. If you need to go back and see how much your taxes were on your vehicle last year, you'd find that under tax records. If you want to know who owns a piece of property. can find that in the property records or the real estate records. There's our online mapping. There is ⁓ information about bids and awards. So if you want to see what open bids the county has that we're accepting bids on, that's on our website. If you want to see what did we award, you know, did we award a bid, that's there. There's information about filling out building permits. All of this information is here on the website. And you can find all of that without having to file a FOIA request, without having to come into an office or call somebody, it's right there for you. Now, Rachel, you referenced this earlier, our ordinances. And a lot of people ask about our ordinances and why they aren't online. And they actually are online, but they are not in a place that is easy to find. And so I wanted to take a moment to tell everybody exactly how to find the ordinances. So this is not... going to necessarily make sense. I want to just emphasize it. It doesn't make sense, but it's where they live right now. Now I will tell you the county is working on a new system for the ordinances and so they will be in a more user friendly, more searchable format in the near future. But if you're looking today to find a copy of an ordinance, what you're going to do is go under the services tab, go into the real estate records search. and right there in the search bar you can type in the ordnance number or the title of the ordnance and that ordnance will be right there. Let's just for example say you were looking for ordnance 07-25. So if you type that in ⁓ it will come up there in the search tab and you'll be able to find that ordnance here. So that's where those ordinances are located today. Again, that is something that we recognize we need to do something different with and we are currently working on that. But again, that gets back to what we talked about earlier, know, transparency versus communication. Yes, technically we're meeting the requirements of transparency because the information is available, but we're falling a little short when it comes to the communication because it's not. in a place that logically makes sense and is easy to find and understand. So that is an area that we have recognized for improvement and that we are working to do better in. So that's what we're looking at there. But I also think it's important that we know that the website isn't the only way for our residents to stay informed. So we'll be talking about our county council meetings in the next segment. So Josh, let's talk a little bit about County Council meetings. You know, we attend them. They are open to the public for anybody to attend. We stream them live on Facebook. We do know that we have had some technical issues in the past. We had a piece of equipment mess up. It seems to be working good right now. That seems all fixed. ⁓ So Josh, can we just talk a little bit about kind of what goes on as far as transparency in County Council meetings? County Council meetings are required to be open to the public. as you mentioned, we live stream them. The agendas are posted ahead of the meeting. The minutes are recorded after the meeting and we walked through all that on our website. There's also a couple of opportunities in the County Council process for public input. For example, when there's an ordinance going through its three readings, there's a requirement for a public hearing on that ordinance. Each of our meetings also has a public comment period. That's something that was recently added at the request of some of our Saluda County residents. And I'd like to add there that you can sign up for that same day. You walk in, we have a paper by the door. You sign your name down. A few minutes later, you were talking to council. Yeah, absolutely. And you get, think it's three minutes that you get to speak during the public comment period. But those periods are designed for the public to provide input into what's going on in the county. Also talking about transparency, have with our ordinances, which ordinances are how county council takes action. And that can be anything from passing the budget to economic development, like a fee in lieu of taxes situation, to passing a litter law or whatever it is that they're they're looking to do. Those things all go through three readings. And the purpose of those readings is to give the public time to have awareness of what they're doing and provide input. Really that first reading is designed to make the public aware. of what the council is considering. And then as you work through the second reading and third reading, that's where all the details are finalized. If it's something that has to be negotiated, whatever it is, that all happens in between first reading and third reading, as well as a public hearing falls into that process as well. We understand not everybody can attend county council meetings, but we really do try to make them accessible. And sometimes it's not necessarily things aren't transparent. It's just that people can't necessarily be there at all these meetings. That's something we do have to understand. But there is one part of county council meetings that creates a lot of confusion and a lot of heartburn, and that is the executive session. And I think it's really important that we talk about the executive session a little bit. It is legal for council to go into executive session for certain purposes, but it is very, very limited in what they can do and discuss. There's really only four things that they can discuss in executive session. They can discuss personnel matters, they can receive legal advice from the county attorney, they can negotiate contracts, and there are certain pieces of economic development that occur in executive session. Now, that's the one that everybody kind of looks like, okay, what, like that doesn't seem to fit. But there are several reasons and you and I've actually asked this question recently. Why would a company want to do part of this conversation behind closed doors? And there's a lot of reasons for that. And we're hoping to do a, episode in the near future on economic development. We'll get into some more during that, but I'll tell you one of the reasons that stuck out to me was let's say that you have a company that's got a plant in Wisconsin. And they're looking to relocate to South Carolina. And so they're talking to Saluda County about building a plant here and moving their operation from Wisconsin to Saluda. And they don't necessarily want the community in Wisconsin or their employees to know about it yet, because it's not a done deal and things might change. So for the beginning of that process, they may want to have some of those conversations with our County council behind closed doors just to protect their current business before they're. making that transition. that's just one of the reasons why they might want to do that. But again, those are the only four real exceptions for executive session. Now it's important to know no decisions can be made in executive session. No votes can be taken. Council does have to come back to open session. They can't even adjourn the meeting in executive session. They have to come back into open session. And I do know that perception wise, executive session doesn't look good. It looks shady. It does look shady. But there are reasons why it is done, but there are limitations to that. But I know that it especially looks bad whenever they come out and they don't take an action or they don't say what they were discussing in any great detail, but those are really the only scenarios in which they can go into executive session. And so I think it's just really important that we all understand the rules and the limitations with executive session. So Rachel, you actually handle the Freedom of Information Act records request, the FOIA request for the county. So why don't you talk a little bit about that process? I do. So the county receives a lot of FOIA requests. FOIA is basically a way for citizens to obtain records from us in a timely manner. I will go ahead and start this section saying a lot of times the easiest way is to pick up the phone and call the department, shoot an email. And a lot of times that'll get it done without having to go through FOIA. ⁓ With FOIA comes fees because when we have to fill FOIAs, it is pulling our employees away from their day-to-day jobs to fill these FOIA requests. And I think that a lot of people don't understand there are limitations to FOIA. There are certain things that aren't accessible under FOIA requests. There's a lot of things that you don't need a FOIA request for, like the things we talked about earlier that are available on the website. All that information is available without filling out a FOIA request. Yeah, it definitely is. There are exemptions to FOIA and that's a whole rabbit hole to go down, but things like personnel, law enforcement matters, some economic development and some legal documents are exempt from FOIA. I will say FOIA does not require the county or any government agency to create a record. So if you're asking for something that doesn't exist, FOIA does not require anybody to create a record to respond to the FOIA. We'll simply tell you, sorry, we don't have it. Right. And so that's something that I think can be a misunderstanding is FOIA only provides you with documents that already exist. And it also doesn't necessarily answer questions. It is specifically to provide a document. So that is what the FOIA request for is for a specific document and it has to be specific, right? It has to be very specific. Sometimes we get FOIAs that are a couple pages long and There's just no way to accurately respond to every single part of it. A lot of times, like I said earlier, the easiest way is to just give somebody a call. And I will also say that doing it that way will probably give you a better answer to the question that you're asking. Cause again, FOIA really is just going to provide you the document. Whereas if you call the department head or any employee in an office, you're going to be able to have a conversation. and get some explanation as opposed to just a document. And I will say another thing with FOIA, it cannot answer a question. Sometimes we get them asking a specific question and the easiest way to get an answer to that question, call the department head, say, hey, I'm just wondering what's going on with this. And most of the time they're happy to answer it. And FOIA can't answer a question. If it's not printed on a document, it's not covered. And I think this is really A great way to sort of sum things up here for us today is, you know, this is, all about communication. And FOIA is a way to access some information, but really calling, having a conversation, sending an email that a lot of times that's going to get you a clearer answer. But again, it's, it's, it's all about communication. There are several ways that you can stay informed on what's going on in Saluda County government. One of the ways is you can follow us on Facebook. There are several Facebook pages associated with Saluda County. We have the Saluda County SC government page, which is the main page. We have separate pages for the emergency management division, the sheriff's office, EMS, the fire service, the county airport, the coroner's office. So there there's a lot of different Facebook pages. So make sure that you're following those. We do put public notices in. the newspaper, we do acknowledge that there's not a Saluda based newspaper anymore, but we do advertise everything in the Twin City News, which is our closest local newspaper. But in another way, right here on the Saluda County unplugged podcast, our, our goal here is, is not just to make information available, but to make it understandable. And I think that really sort of brings us to the close of today's episode and really understanding these issues that are connected but sort of different of transparency and communication and transparency being access to information, but communication really providing that understanding. And we recognize that we've got some room to improve. We are not shying away from that. We are working on it. But I also want to acknowledge that really there's a shared responsibility here between the government and the public. The government has a responsibility to provide access to the information. And the public has a responsibility to engage with that information and ask questions and help us identify areas where maybe there are some information gaps. And so if we want to do this better, it's going to take us working collaboratively to make some progress. Yeah, I definitely agree. It's kind of like a group project. We all have to work together to really close that communication gap that we've talked about. Absolutely. know, transparency works best when information is available and when people know how to find it and understand it. And that's what we're trying to build here on the Saluda County Unplugged podcast. We want access, but we also want understanding. And so that is our goal here. And hopefully we can all work together to achieve it. If you have questions or an idea for an upcoming episode, remember to email us at publicinfo at saludacounty.sc.gov. We'd love to hear from you. Absolutely. And we hope that you have gotten something out of today's episode of Saluda County Unplugged. Thank you all for tuning in today and ⁓ we'll see you soon. from the courthouse steps to the country roads we're talking about the plans that shape our home this is salute of county unplug we're shining a light, shining a light, yeah salute of county unplug So