Wednesday, November 2, 2011

For those of us in the peanut gallery...

...that spend much time poking and pouring over the city's perilously clunky website, I want to share an observation that you may or may not realize.  This past Monday, I downloaded the meeting packet for this Thursday's - tomorrow's - meeting on the Casino Building tenant leases.  I was about to do a post on it and something told me I had better check to see if there are any changes to it from when I first downloaded and reviewed it.  Well, come to find out there are 47 more pages of back-up material for the meeting - with no indication of when the changes are made or what is different.

One exception being a memo from Commissioner McVoy requesting a "second opinion" from an unidentified broker that supposedly has 40 years of experience.  This is his attempt to convince his "colleagues" that the second floor restaurant space is so unique that surely it would attract a quality, long term tenant.  More on that later.

I have Acrobat Professional and I use it to highlight, comment, bookmark, OCR the packets.  It does have a compare document command, but it doesn't work on documents over 250 pages.  The new edition of the packet has 356 pages.  Now it is search and find what is different - or just re-review the whole thing again.

Oh, gods that are our elected officials, can you find a way to indicate what has changed from the original posting to the up-dated one - and when that happened?  We may be in the peanut gallery, but it seems that we are only getting the shells.

Click here for a link to the city's website for the current packet.  The agenda for the meeting appears below:
Update:  Sometime between downloading the second (?) version of the packet and now, two more pages were added.  That was McVoy's memo.