Rex suggests that the county gets a public record system like Sebastian!

Bill,


   Would you like to look at all my concrete files?  With about two clicks they're yours. I may have 15 to 20 MS Word docs and countless emails -- all since Dec 20. The emails are mostly noise level, but a few might be good to sort through.


The purposes I have in mind is


     To be sure we are thorough, accurate, and concise.


      Get ourselves organized in case we decide to go to the Commissioner's hearings w/o a lawyer    


      Get prepared to hand over background to a legal team


     Get prepared for if, or when, a lawyer comes on board


    

     Organize the information into Societial Issues, Environmental Issues, and Economic Issues.
         (That's the taxonomy at the highest level an expert suggested for our cause)


     Putting the info onto SCC


Also I have a four inch stack of records I requested under the FOIA (equivalent at the County), when  Kimberly Massung was still the Executive Aide to the Board of County Commissioners. Most of us have only skimmed what initially seemed to be critical. It would be good if a team of folks could "mine" the information for some other nuggets. ANOTHER PURPOSE IS TO FIND OUT WHAT THE COUNTY SEARCH DID NOT REVEAL.  On a face-to-face basis I will share what I think we missed and some ideas for designing more searches of the public records. I'll bet you would have a lot to contribute here.


As an aside, one needs to budget for these requests. The last one cost $50, and that was because one of Kimberly's people copied some of the pages back to back. That saved us about $30, but it was a pia to sort / organize the information. I spent another $30 or so for copying all the docs on one side of the paper so I could sort in chronological order for my reading. WITH THE LETTERS "STACKING UP" AT THE COUNTY, THE NEXT RECORD SEARCH WILL COST MUCH MORE. That's why we should all noodle these activities very carefully.


Win or lose, when this battle is over, we should remember to request the County to get a record system like the City of Sebastian.
They are online. We can do record searches of Sebastian at our computers, download the files, and pay nary a cent. The County system requires our time, money, and eye balling to mine for the salient information. Or perhaps we could scan them in and then have machine processable search routines, another $%^&#$%^ task in this series of nightmares.




Another sub-strategy in all these matters is to ensure that our messages to government officials and their staffs get into the Public Records.   The sword cuts both ways though. We need to be careful what we write to the government people because our stuff also gets into the Public Records. When Kimberly responded to our request it was about a day before one of our meetings. The search took about five business days and already we netted about a dozen letters written by our neighbors. Records we really didn't need to pay for, but it was gratifying to see the responsiveness.


You may want to size up the project before agreeing to all these ideas. We could break up the tasks.
You might even want to find some others to help. "Many Hands Make Light Work."


So let's meet next week when you return and are free and see if we can get a good Records Strategy developed.


Rex